


might stop to check you out

by Lexie



Category: Know Not Why - Hannah Johnson
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:56:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8884795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lexie/pseuds/Lexie
Summary: Howie is a directionless sophomore slacking his way through classes. Arthur is a long-suffering RA who's not having the finest of years. The more things change, the more they stay the same.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katewonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katewonder/gifts).



> katewonder, I heard you like Arthur and AUs. Me too. ♥ Happy Yuletide! Title borrowed from "Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes.

Arthur's new year kicks off with a bang.

More accurately, it kicks off with a panicked call from the new Mahoney Hall house director, who, thus far, seems like a very nice man who was utterly unprepared to come in halfway through the school year to manage a team of resident assistants that included the likes of Mari Thomas.

"Jonathan?" Arthur asks dubiously, when the steady stream of words coming from his phone finally dies down. He's sitting up in bed, because two years of RA instincts mean that his phone ringing at odd hours will send him catapulting upright, but he's barely awake. He scrubs his gritty-feeling eyes with his free hand. " _What_ did Mari do?"

"She's out," says Jonathan. "She bought six handles of vodka for a freshman party, drank half of one herself, and led a conga line through the dining hall, which she ended by lighting a cigarette off the gas range in the kitchen and then puking into the dishwasher."

"It's the second day of January term," Arthur says blankly, appalled and fascinated despite himself. "It's a _Tuesday_."

"Arthur, I'm gonna need you to wake up, please," says Jonathan. He sounds desperate, his voice rising in pitch. Frankly, he sounds almost unhinged. He's been in the job for only a month, since Jeannine Staples abruptly quit after 15 years, and Arthur has some concerns about his stress levels. "Can you do it?"

"Do what, exactly?"

"Cover Mari's two halls. It'll only be for a month; just until I can get someone hired and trained."

Arthur is definitely awake now, eyebrows rising high and then pulling low across his forehead. He thinks he can feel the beginnings of a headache beginning to thump in his temples. He spent too long working on his econ paper late last night, squinting at his laptop screen while wearing his glasses, and he's been woken after only a few hours of sleep. "I don't live in Mahoney," he points out.

"That place is a nightmare." Jonathan sounds close to hysterics. "We all knew it needed some help, but I've spent half the night learning just how wild Mari let her halls run. Did you know they host an _Easter keg hunt_ every year??"

"Yes," says Arthur. "Everyone does. I reminded your predecessor of it, repeatedly."

"Arthur, you're my best staffer. You run a tight ship, and everyone tells me you were the only thing that kept Mahoney from spontaneously combusting when you were assigned there last year. I need an RA who I can trust to get a handle on this. I'm desperate, _please_. Will you do it?"

Arthur sighs, swinging his legs over to sit on the edge of his bed. He hunches forward over his knees. It's January term, which will only last the month, but he has 20 students of his own in Harrison Hall, three Jan-term classes that are counting toward requirements for his major, and a relationship on the rocks with a boyfriend who he barely sees except to sleep (and who is certainly both awake and annoyed now, starting to shift restlessly under the covers behind Arthur).

"Yes," Arthur says, finally. "Of course."

"Thank you!" Jonathan lets out a massive whoosh of breath. "Thank you. You're a lifesaver."

Arthur is fairly certain that this is not how a boss-employee relationship, particularly between a college junior and a full-grown adult — if a young full-grown adult who's only a few years older than Arthur — is supposed to work. "The actual Mahoney RAs will need to chip in," Arthur warns. "I can't be there all the time."

"Right, yes, of course," says Jonathan, already sounding distracted. "I'll have a word with them. And I'll let you get back to it; seriously, thank you, bye."

"You're welcome," Arthur says, but it's to dead air. Jonathan has already hung up. He sighs again and sets his phone down on the bedside table. It's little more than a haphazard pile of particleboard hammered into a vaguely table-shaped object, like most of the university-issued furniture, but, unlike his desk last year, it hasn't collapsed yet, so that's something.

Behind him, the covers stir. Arthur glances back over his shoulder and finds Patrick blinking fuzzily. "Who was it?"

"The president; he wanted my advice," says Arthur, one side of his mouth tipping up.

Patrick stares at him. He can be astoundingly literal.

"...We'll discuss it later," Arthur says, patting his shoulder, and he goes to the bathroom to splash water on his face. Writing the conclusion of a paper on supply chain management while still half-asleep would be a recipe for disaster.

He shuffles down the cold hall to the co-ed bathroom and is surprised, when he pushes the door open, to find a resident already in there at this hour of the morning. He's even more surprised to realize, from the blur of purple-red hair on top of a very short frame, that it's Cora Caldwell.

As he gets close enough that she comes into focus even without his contacts, he finds that she is leaning over a sink, her face a scant few inches from the mirror, and diligently applying thick lines of black makeup around her eyes. "Oh good, it's you," she says, without looking away from her task.

"It's me," Arthur agrees, too tired for Cora, and he goes to the other sink to splash a few handfuls of lukewarm water into his face. Something brushes his left shoulder, and he blinks water out of his eyes, dripping over the sink, and looks over.

It's Cora, holding out a fistful of paper towels. He slowly takes them. "To what do I owe this detente?"

"You look like shit," she says baldly. It's an unprecedented display of (rude, granted) concern from his most troublesome resident. Arthur regularly questions what he did to deserve to be Cora Caldwell’s RA for two years in a row. For Halloween this year, she literally attended their hall's ResLife-sponsored party as "the bane of Arthur's existence," wearing heavy boots that made massive amounts of noise with every step, with candy cigarettes and what she swore was a fake joint hanging out of her mouth. She walked around the party with her phone blaring the terrible rock music that Arthur has spent the last three semesters fielding noise complaints about.

Arthur's other residents seemed to find the costume hilarious.

"You're too kind," he says dryly, patting his face dry. "You're up early."

"Haven't been to bed yet," Cora says, wiggling her eyebrows at herself in the mirror. "You should try it sometime. You know, live a little."

"I'm living perfectly well, thank you," Arthur says with great dignity, and he goes back to his room.

He's sitting at his desk (a sheet of particleboard balanced on top of two wooden blocks — again, the dorm furniture leaves a great deal to be desired) putting the finishing touches on his paper's concluding paragraph when Patrick finally rolls over in bed and takes out his earplugs. The sun only started rising five minutes ago and Patrick's face looks washed out in the thin light.

"Good morning," says Arthur.

"Did someone call you at five o'clock this morning?" Patrick asks, yawning, his voice gravelly.

Arthur turns his chair toward the bed. "Mari Thomas apparently had a spectacular breakdown last night and has been sent home on leave. Jonathan asked me to take over her halls during January term."

"Seriously?" asks Patrick, his eyebrows skyrocketing toward his hair line.

“Jonathan needed help,” says Arthur.

Arthur has known Patrick since they met in jazz band their junior year of high school. He knows exactly how this argument will go. Patrick will say, ‘I thought we were going to spend Jan term together.’

Arthur will say, ‘And we will.’

Patrick will say, ‘Arthur, you signed up for three classes, and now you’re going to be in Mahoney all month negotiating with that batch of miscreants.’ 

(Well, he probably won’t say exactly that; those are more Arthur’s words. But that will be the general gist of it.)

Arthur will apologize but underscore the importance of the commitment, Patrick will be annoyed, and everything will be back to normal by dinner time.

Then Patrick says shortly, “Fine,” and all of Arthur’s expected conversations go up in smoke.

“Fine?” Arthur echoes.

“Whatever,” says Patrick, and he puts his ear plugs back in and rolls over. 

Arthur looks at the stiff line of Patrick’s back for a long moment, sour taste rising in his mouth, before he slowly turns back to his paper.

+

The first time Arthur hears his name shouted across the academic quad, he thinks it must be someone hailing another Arthur. It isn’t a terribly common name in his age bracket, but it's not every day that he's greeted with that kind of loud, insistent enthusiasm. When he turns, though, it's his cousin Kristy waving frantically from the path that runs parallel to the one he's walking on, her arms windmilling in a blur of pink coat and white mittens. She hops the snowbank and determinedly forges through the foot of snow that currently covers the grass where students will lounge in warmer weather.

"Arthur, oh my gosh," Kristy gasps, laughing. "Where _are_ you this morning? I've been calling you!"

"I’m sorry; I suppose I wasn't paying enough attention." He shakes it off and reaches out to steady her as she clambers onto the path with him.

"Are you on your way to study?”

"I am," he confirms, and he has to smile back when she beams at him.

"We can walk together!" she says cheerfully. "I'm taking a bookmaking workshop for Jan term; it meets in the library basement." That explains what she's doing on the main campus — she's an education major and spends the majority of her academic time on lower campus, at the bottom of the hill. Arthur rarely sees her unless they're in a ResLife meeting or they've made intentional plans together. 

Arthur offers her the crook of his elbow, and she tucks her hand in. The wind is biting, cutting across the open quad, and the few students who are out are scurrying to avoid the cold. "Have you heard about Mari?" he asks, and from the way that her face immediately falls, he knows that the ResLife gossip train has most definitely left the station.

"It's so sad!" Kristy proclaims. "I'm glad she's going home, because I think she definitely needs her family to help."

"It sounds like it," he agrees, diplomatically. "Was the situation that severe in the fall?"

"She smoked out the window in her room a lot," Kristy says hesitantly. "I don't _think_ she'd ever bought the residents alcohol before, but now I'm not sure." Kristy is by far the most effective RA currently living in Mahoney Hall, though she maintains order primarily through constant baking in the house office kitchen and because the residents on her two halls adore her and would do anything to ensure that she stays happy and keeps her job. The law and order RA, Kristy is not.

Arthur knows what the residents' feelings are. He and his cousin are, most likely, the two least- and best-loved RAs working in the residence halls of west campus. Their family would be so proud, Arthur thinks to himself sardonically. Kristy's is, anyway. His parents don't tend to understand anything that doesn't focus on his degree-in-progress in business administration.

"What's Jonathan going to do now?" Kristy goes on. "Mari wasn’t always super invested, but her residents listened to her.” She pauses, and wrinkles her nose. “I mean, mostly."

"He's actually asked me to step in."

"You're doing _what_?" Kristy asks, aghast. She has been walking along at Arthur's side, textbooks tucked under her arm and blonde ponytail bouncing out from under her headband, but she is apparently appalled enough to have stopped in her tracks, pulling Arthur up short too.

A tall boy walking and staring at his phone — probably, Arthur thinks sagely, playing that Pokemon game — nearly runs Kristy over, and Arthur pulls her out of the way, just off the main path. "I'm helping Jonathan in Mahoney Hall, only for the month," Arthur says.

"Are you sure?" Kristy asks. Her sweet face is twisted up with concern, which is almost worse than the cold shoulder from Patrick this morning and the disapproval that Arthur's parents will inevitably express. "You have so much on your plate already this year, and Mahoney— I _love_ my halls, they're the best, but Mari's old halls can be pretty ... interesting, you know?"

From Arthur's preternaturally kind cousin, that's practically a cursing out. "Thank you, Kristy, but I'll be fine," Arthur says crisply. "It's January term; only half of the residents are back, and I expect things will be quiet. It's going to be a perfectly ordinary month."

Those are, it turns out, words that Arthur will later look back on with chagrin.

* * *

"Howie," says Mitch. "Howie. Howie. Howie. Howie."

Howie is going to murder his roommate.

"Howie. Howie! _HOWIE_."

He's going to straight up cut a bitch. No jury in this land will convict him.

He says that out loud, but he's mostly asleep and his face is mashed into his pillow, so Mitch may miss the threat in it.

"Come on, we've gotta go," Mitch says. "There’s a hall meeting. They said we have to go."

"Go on without me," Howie says into his pillow, blissed out from the near-perfect nap that he's ready to get back to. He is, if he does say so himself, _the king_ of the post-class nap. The sultan of sleep. "I've chosen my hill to die on and this is it."

"Amber's waiting, dude, come on," Mitch says. He sounds like he's jiggling his knee frantically.

Is that whole ... thing.... still happening? Howie chooses to pretend it's not happening. It works for him. It's better for everyone that way. He's fairly sure Amber doesn't know it's happening, and that works for him too.

"Tell her I love sleep more than her," Howie says. "She's a veritable angel, is our Amber. She'll understand."

"No, she won't," says Mitch. "I mean, she _is_ really great, that part's true—"

If Howie doesn't put a stop to this immediately, it'll go on all afternoon. He might have to face ... things. Facing things is bad; he generally avoids it as strenuously as humanly possible.

He shoves himself up, the crappy, institutional-rubber mattress creaking dangerously under him. "Okay, okay! Fine," he says. "I'm up. This is me, getting up."

Mitch grins at him and throws open the door to their room — and Heather Grimsby sails past down the hall toward their lounge, shiny hair and all, with a long look in at them.

"Shit," says Mitch, because Mitchell Ballard is an attentive partner in bromance.

"Nope," says Howie, and he lays back down again. "Nope, nope nope nope."

Mitch leaves him alone, after that.

Howie ought to go back to sleep. He'd been getting his nap groove on, and he earned it after he stayed awake through his entire film class, even after the professor switched off the lights and turned on some kind of Swedish art house movie. There were a lot of blondes, and not in a hot way, and close-ups on mitten-wearing hands making snowmen as slowly as possible. Howie's still not clear on the symbolism. But he's awake now, so he flails his arm across the bedside table until he can grab his phone. His inbox is pretty sparse — an all-campus email reminding students that they have to go to class unless it’s an official snow day, the start of a reply-all flamewar that someone in the financial aid office managed to shut down before it got entertaining, and a note from his mom. 

His mom has sent him and Amber a proposed outline of her newest novella (this one is apparently going to be a steamy 20,000 words about Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill after the end of _Emma_ ), because she lives to torture Howie and Amber will actually be interested. In the email body, his mom casually referenced how Howie was just home for Christmas break and she’s going to be busy next weekend and she’s sure there’s lots happening on campus, so he might as well stay at school.

Joke’s on her — Amber’s visiting her parents next weekend, so Howie’s definitely going back home again.

By the time Mitch makes his triumphant return, with Amber leading the charge, Howie is very, very close to beating his own high score on that cell phone game with the whole neighborhood full of cats. It’s important stuff.

"You are such a baby about Heather Grimsby; it's incredible, really," Amber says with no preamble.

"She's the embodiment of true evil," Howie tells her, without looking up from his cats. "Have you seen her hair? So shiny. Pretty sure she's that little girl from _The Ring_ , all grown up."

"The little girl from _The Ring_ is both really young and very fictional," Amber points out.

“You can’t put anything past Heather Grimsby,” Howie says darkly. If anyone could figure out how to come to life from a movie, it would be her. “Isn’t _The Ring_ all about coming out of the TV and becoming real?”

“Have you actually seen _The Ring_?” Mitch asks, scratching his head.

It just seemed like the appropriate cultural reference. “Mitchman, you know I’m more of a classic horror kind of dude,” Howie says. “Give me George Romero or give me death.”

Amber is sitting in Howie’s desk chair, her arms folded. "What is your obsession with Heather Grimsby?" she says. "You've got to get over it, Howie. It was a _year_ ago. People have ill-advised hookups during freshman orientation week. It's a thing, or so I'm led to believe."

Howie still starts to sweat — like, immediate fountains pouring from his armpits; disgusting but true — when he thinks about that party. He'd had a couple of beers, enough to enthusiastically throw himself into dancing even though he knows that his picture is next to "shameful white boy dancing" in the dictionary but, unfortunately, not nearly enough beer to wipe his memory. He remembers everything. Heather's shiny hair in the dark, the two of them laughing and stumbling back to her room, and that thing, that completely untrue, so-funny-it's-not-funny _thing_ , that she'd said right before he booked it; the thing Howie has never repeated to even Amber.

"Like you'd know!" The second that the words come out of his mouth, Howie regrets them. He regrets them before he's even finished saying "know." He doesn't mean it — he just feels so fucking weird about Amber doing Heather-Grimsby-related digging and his mouth gets ahead of his brain, and instead of playful and banter-y, it starts coming out mean. He tries to stop himself, so it ends up sounding more like, "Like you'd kn- _uh_!" but it's too late, the damage is done.

Amber goes red in the face. There's nothing gradual or ladylike about it; it's the full "Amber Clark is gonna kill you" zero-to-sixty flush, the one that Howie has known to be extremely fucking wary of ever since he popped the head off one of her Barbies when they were nine years old.

"I mean— I just meant, not everybody does that whole— Meaningless hookup culture thing, who does that, right? Psh! Psh- _aw_ , I say! Tinder and the internet and such, it's ruining our generation's ability to forge genuine connections—"

"You met her at a frat party, Howie," Amber says, and she abruptly looks tired, which is somehow even worse than furious or upset. "Whatever. Mitchell, I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow."

"Amber, I didn't mean," Howie says, unsure of what's about to come out of his mouth but willing to trust that it can't get much worse, and she slams the door behind her with admirable poise.

"Dude," Mitch says reproachfully. Mitch's reproachful face is terrible. It feels like Howie kicked a puppy.

"Don't look at me like that! I didn't mean it!" Howie waits a beat, then, despite the gravity of the situation, still can't help himself. He asks, " _You're_ going to be awake for _breakfast_?" Ever since Howie first met him in the most boring pre-orientation group of all time, Mitch has somehow scheduled every single one of his classes for the afternoon and evening class blocks, and he still manages to sleep through at least one class every semester. It's one of the things Howie admires most about him. He's a genius.

“Yeah, uh, gotta get those tater tots,” says Mitch evasively, and then he sticks his big headphones on.

If you don't acknowledge it, it's not happening, Howie reminds himself before his brain can start crying, and he picks up his phone again. _amber,_ he texts, _im a giant dillhole. that came out totally wrong and i will gladly grovel at your feet until the end of all time to make it up to you._

When he sees the three dots pop up, signifying that she's typing, Howie knows he's been forgiven. _Wow,_ Amber says. _No capitalization or apostrophes? You MUST be feeling bad._

 _terrible,_ texts Howie. _heinous, hideous, abhorrent, abominable, atrocious..._

 _Okay, take it easy on the thesaurus,_ she says. _Just try not being a dillhole next time._

 _so noted,_ says Howie, awash with relief, and he sends her a massive string of random emojis.

Just to _extra_ ensure he makes up for it, Howie wakes up early the next morning — something he never does except for that one single terrible eight A.M. class that he made the mistake of taking in the fall — and crashes the Mitch-and-Amber breakfast show in the dining hall.

"Look who it is," Amber says, when he staggers up with a tray full of muffins and assorted deliciousness. "King Dillhole himself." She pushes her chair over to make room.

Mitch looks less amused to see him, which tells Howie that crashing was definitely the right call. "Dude, weren't you asleep when I left?"

"Pish posh," says Howie. "Sleep is for the weak." He thumps his tray down on the table directly between Mitch and Amber, and pulls up a chair. Mitch has to slide his chair away to avoid catching Howie's shoulder in the face. It's an inspired bit of anti-matchmaking, if Howie does say so himself. "What're we talking about?"

"How mad the new RA was that no one came to the mandatory hall meeting yesterday," says Amber. "He was calm about it, but I really expected to see steam come out of his ears."

"You guys went," Howie says, waving them off with a muffin. "I'm sure it was fine."

"Me, Ambie, and Heather Grimsby were the only people there," says Mitch dubiously.

"Amber, Heather Grimsby, and I," Amber says, queenly. When it comes to Amber and the use of "me" vs. "I," you best come correct, son. She pauses with a spoonful of yogurt halfway to her mouth, and looks thoughtful. "He was hot, though."

Howie's not sure who frowns harder: him or Mitch. "The RA? Is this a thing now?" Howie asks. "You and angry authority figures?"

"Gross," says Amber. "No, he just had that sexy-smart thing going on, you know?"

Howie is still assiduously Not Noticing the Mitch-and-Amber thing (or, more accurately, the Mitch-about-Amber thing), but he still feels a little bad when he sees Mitch's face fall. "You know what's weird?" Howie asks loyally. "Goats."

“ _Goats_?” says Amber, incredulous.

They argue about goats for the rest of breakfast.

Howie is a great friend.

+

Howie's college career is going just fine, thanks. Sure, he doesn't go to some fancy-ass Massachusetts college like his twin brother Dennis, and yeah, he's behind Amber and Dennis and everyone else they went to high school with because he spent a year taking random community college classes that didn't actually offer transferrable credits before his mom finally forced him to (a) apply to state school and (b) move out instead of commuting from home. "I'm _fine_ , Howie," she'd said, which had been a blatant lie and they'd both known it. "Or, well, I miss your dad like hell, but that doesn't mean you should stay at home forever. I'm a big girl, and I need you to get out there in the big wide world, okay?"

So here's Howie, out there in the big wide world.

Yes, he has to declare a major by the end of spring semester and he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, and, okay, if you want to put a fine point on it, he goes home to hang with his mom, like, every weekend.

Howie is living the life, yo.

He's got Mitch, who's a pretty great roommate, all things considered, and he's got Amber. He's passing all of his classes. He could easily win an Olympic medal in avoiding Heather Grimsby, with a difficulty level of She Lives on the Hall Next to Howie's (because destiny has it in for Howie, that's why). The dining hall listened to student complaints and is now open an hour longer between breakfast and lunch every day. He can open jars like a boss. He's got mad jar-related skills.

The jar skills come in handy when Mitch wants to throw a party.

"Howie," he'd said, " _Game of Thrones_ mid-season premiere," and, even though Howie knew Mitch had never been interested in the good old _GoT_ before Amber started hate-watching it (and then love-watching it, and now … well, her relationship with _Games of Thrones_ is complicated), how could Howie say no to that face?

So Howie opens several jars of salsa, Mitch produces slightly-expired bags of tortilla chips from his work-study job in the dining hall, and they open their double to a whole bunch of strangers.

Strangers to Howie, anyway. Mitch seems to know every single person who darkens their doorstep, and Amber greets several by name too. She's wearing a T-shirt that says QUEEN OF THE NORTH, and she's already started an argument about the show's treatment of women with the guy next to her. Howie thinks it may end in fisticuffs. There's a gleam in her eye, though, so she's enjoying herself. Anyway, she would clearly win, if it came down to a no holds barred cage match. Amber's a certified badass.

Howie vaguely recognizes a couple of people as hallmates who he’s brushed his teeth next to in the bathroom. He's, like, 60% sure that he's not supposed to know who all of their guests are; Mitch just knows everyone, and Amber has apparently found some kind of university-wide _Game of Thrones_ nerd community.

They log in to somebody's mom's HBO Go account and, for once in its life, Mitch's TV actually functions the way it's supposed to without a good smack first, which is bizarre but pretty excellent. They cram easily 25 people onto Mitch's and Howie's beds, which have been pushed together to make a long bench, and onto pillows on the floor, and someone cracks open a few six packs of cheap beer.

"You want one?" asks the guy who's handing out the beers.

"Nah, my dude, I've got wiiiings," says Howie cheerfully, rattling his half-finished Red Bull can at him, and then.

It happens.

The door opens and Heather Grimsby walks in.

Heather Grimsby is in Howie's room. She does not look like she has any regrets at all about walking right into a room without even knocking first. She just says, "Hey," in that inimitable Heather Grimsby monotone, to somebody on the other end of Howie's bed, and she comes over and sits down.

On Howie's bed.

Heather Grimsby is sitting on Howie's bed. There are four people between them, but her shiny hair draws Howie's eye like a beacon. A beacon of horribleness. She's monstrous.

"Actually, you know what, yeah, give me alllll your Natty Light thanks," says Howie, and he snatches a beer out of somebody's hand and downs half of it in one go.

He's fairly sure it was the same guy who offered him a beer before and he didn’t just steal some rando’s drink.

Probably.

+

So the thing is: Howie is not drunk.

He's definitely not drunk. He's just a little ... fuzzy, by the time that the episode actually starts, and then there's a lot of sword shaking — both literal and metaphorical, heyo! — and fighting and drinking and yelling. The yelling is both on the television and in his dorm room, where the viewers apparently have strong feelings on Cersei and whether or not she will do … something. Howie’s not paying much attention. There's lots of raucous shouting, load groaning, and flicking tortilla chips at the TV. There have never been so many people in Howie's room in his life. His college life. His life at college. He's a sophomore in college. What up!

"What up," he says to Mitch's friend Rudy, who is (a) massive, (b) sitting beside Howie, and (c) apparently a huge khaleesi fanboy. Who knew?

"Howmeister!" Rudy greets. "You're trashed, bro."

"Rude," says Howie. "Rudy. Rude! You're rude and your name is Rudy!"

Rudy laughs, and it probably sets off car alarms all the way over on east campus. "That's a good one!" he says, with all appearance of genuineness. Genuinity? Whatever, Howie's a genius.

Farther down the bed, Heather Grimsby laughs and tosses her hair, and Howie just ... drinks. Fuck. Now is the time for drinks.

He loses time, a little bit.

+

Somebody’s head gets chopped off in a spray of blood on the show, because of course it does, and the whole room erupts in a roar.

+

Two strangers are playing beer pong across Howie’s desk. The ball keeps bouncing over his laptop. It’s fine.

+

“Amber,” Howie says, trying to lean over the guy she’s arguing with. “Amber, hey.”

“Not now, drunkie,” Amber says, absently patting his head without even looking at him, and then she pins her debate partner with a hot stare. “Surely you jest. Sansa is just _starting_ to play the game; she’s going to be unstoppable!”

Howie should be glad Amber’s branching out and making friends. Or enemies? He’s not entirely clear on how this argument is going. Her cheeks are pink and her eyes are shining and she’s leaning forward to make a point with vehemence, surrounded by a knot of people who are hanging on her every word, and Howie feels kind of sick.

+

When somebody on the floor says loudly, "Oh shit," Howie makes the completely fair assumption that they're talking about the show. _Everybody_ is talking about the show, mostly, though Amber has started trying to shush people. The people will not be shushed. They have strong feelings which they are going to express in the way that they see fit, which is: bellowing.

Someone shouts something that manages to shut up the entire room, though, and Howie slowly realizes that everyone has gone deathly silent and is staring in a particular direction. He turns and his head feels like it wobbles on his neck.

It's a guy. A guy wearing absurdly neat pajamas (does he iron them? do people iron their sweatpants?), who has light green eyes and very long eyelashes, which Amber will be furious about and — he is saying a thing that Howie is possibly supposed to be listening to.

"Do you have any idea how many university rules you’re breaking?" the guy is demanding, into the aforementioned death-silence. "I ought to call public safety immediately."

Several voices start talking all at once. It's a regular gabfest. Arguing-fest.

“Enough, _enough_!” the stranger shouts. He doesn’t look like the kind of person who shouts very often. He’s wearing nerdy glasses. “All of you, get out; the party is over.”

In silence, people start scrambling, grabbing coats and keys. Empty beer cans clatter. 

“What the fuck?” a girl is objecting quietly, to Howie’s left.

“That’s the new RA,” another girl hisses back at her.

This is Mr. Smart-Sexy, according to Amber? Seriously? He's tall; who is even that tall? Weird tall weirdos, that's who. He's skinny, the kind of thing where you know the guy's all knees and elbows. Not that Howie is thinking about his knees or his elbows. That would be random. That's not a thing.

“Effective immediately, the hall meeting has been rescheduled for tomorrow morning,” the new RA says crisply. He’s standing by the door, looming with his too-tall frame and his eyelashes. “Nine o’clock, in the lounge. I’ll be taking attendance.”

Howie’s whole body feels hot and alien. It must be rage. “Hey,” he says. It’s the first time he’s gotten up in a while; the room lurches and then steadies itself enough for him to walk over to the RA, as guests continue streaming out of the room. There were more people in here than he’d realized. It’s like watching a clown car empty out. 

The RA isn’t even looking at him. Who the hell does he think he is? “ _Hey_ ,” says Howie, and the RA’s eyes finally land on him.

He really does have stupid eyelashes.

“What’re you, the fun police?” Howie demands, and then he mimics a siren. It’s a pretty good imitation, if he does say so himself. Not as good as the Chewbacca impression he can do, though. That shit brings the house down.

The RA’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Yeah, you heard me,” Howie says, “with your — _face_. Mari would’ve let us go forth and _GoT_ in peace.”

“Well,” says the RA, enunciating every word perfectly. There’s so much judgment in that one single syllable. Howie is going to choke on his freaking rage. “I’m not Mari. Things are going to be different in Mahoney Hall now.”

Howie snorts. “What’re _you_ gonna do about it? Lock us all in our rooms, _Jane Eyre_ -style? You can’t lock people in attics anymore. Attics aren't legal.” He still hasn't read _Jane Eyre_ , which Amber is going to really and truly murder him for some day, but you don't (a) befriend Amber Clark and (2) take English 101 without picking up the ability to spitball about madwomen in the attic.

The RA’s face is glacially calm, now, but there's tightness to the corners of his mouth that suggests he's angry. Good. Howie's just seen the guy for the first time and he already loves seeing his perfect composure get messed up. They're standing close together, because Howie has pushed into his face. Howie feels ... hot. Itchy.

"Howie," someone says behind him; "holy _crap_ ," and then Mitch has a grip on Howie's arm and he's pulling him back. Is everyone else gone now? Apparently everyone else is gone. Mitch probably walked Amber to her door, even though it’s only down at the end of the hall. Howie really seriously cannot deal with that situation. Like, at all.

"I'm sorry," says Mitch, "I'm really sorry—"

"I'm not sorry!" Howie insists loudly, yanking his arm away from Mitch, and immediately almost overbalancing. "There were dragons!" Mitch grabs him again. Mitch is grabby tonight.

"He _is_ , really," Mitch says helplessly, pulling Howie back. "I'm just — I'm gonna make sure he goes to bed, and this won't happen again, I promise." Somewhere in the back, the deep deep recesses, of his mind Howie feels bad about making _Mitch_ be the responsible roommate, but all he feels in the front of his mind is pure, righteous white-hot rage.

"See that it doesn't," says The Least Sexy RA of All Time (who the fuck even says that?), and he slams the door behind him.

Mitch releases Howie, who promptly sits down hard on the floor.

He definitely sat down on purpose. He absolutely did not immediately fall like a puppet with cut strings because Mitch let go of him.

Mitch stares down at him, his eyes huge. "I don't know if I should be mad at you or really impressed," he says. " _Dude_."

"Impressed," Howie decides, "always impressed," and then he lies down in a pile of broken tortilla chips.

* * *

In the morning, Arthur faces a set of residents who are huddled together and notably the worse for wear. The vast majority are still wearing their pajamas; one girl appears to have rolled out of bed swaddled in her duvet and somehow waddled down the hall like that, which is impressive. 

Arthur stands grimly at the front of the room with Jonathan, who's deeply confused by the speed with which this meeting came together but seems game to play along. Arthur hasn't told Jonathan that there was beer involved in the party he'd broken up. By all rights, he should. 

Technically he could lose his job for not saying anything. That would represent a loss of free room and board, which would mean he couldn't afford to finish his degree without accepting more financial help from his father. There are days when Arthur cynically wonders if leaving without his degree would really be so terrible. Business isn’t exactly his passion in life.

However, ResLife quietly allows RAs a certain amount of leeway. There are judgment calls to be made, at times. Arthur doesn't often exercise his right to them, which has not made him tremendously popular among his residents. 

That's fine. It's his job to watch out for them, not to be their friend. 

But last night, Arthur was not technically on-duty. He wasn't even on-call; he'd gone, in his capacity as a private student, to tell them to shut up. He'd been in a vile mood. He's still in a vile mood. He's exhausted. He's left Patrick still in bed with his back turned obstinately to Arthur, pretending he was asleep so they didn't have to speak to one another. And frankly, he just does not want to manage the hassle of disciplinary proceedings this week. 

For once, Arthur can give a warning.

He thinks he may have to do more than that, when he sees neither Mitchell Ballard nor Howard Jenkins, whose names he’d looked up on his student roster this morning, in his captive audience, but the door opens and the two of them stagger in together just as the clock strikes nine. 

One of them looks apologetic and sleepy, while the other, the one who'd bellowed absolute garbage in Arthur's face like a drunken foghorn, looks both obstinate and miserably hungover. He’s wearing sunglasses and his face is actually green-tinged, which Arthur personally had always thought an invention of overdramatic fiction authors. The pair of them flop down into the last open space on one of the lounge sofas.

"Right, is that everyone?" Jonathan asks placidly, and then he turns on his proverbial heel and launches into a blistering dressing down; one that's all the more impressive given that he’s unaware of the alcohol that was involved.

When he finally pauses for more than three seconds, the lounge clears out with alacrity.

“I think that went well,” Jonathan says, looking pleased with himself, as residents flee back to their rooms. “Hopefully you won’t be able to hear a Mahoney party clear across the quad again.”

“Hopefully,” Arthur agrees, with some doubt. The noise had woken him from a sound sleep two buildings away.

The resident who’d confronted him last night is still curled up on one of the lounge couches. While Jonathan walks right past him, Arthur pauses, for a moment, looking down at him. His eyes appear to be closed behind the sunglasses.

“Is the hangover treating you well?” Arthur asks dryly.

“I feel great,” says Howard and/or Mitchell, blatantly lying. His T-shirt is inside out. He's still wearing the oversized sunglasses. His jaw is clenched; he’s clearly teetering on the verge of vomiting. Arthur takes a discreet half step back. “Never better. How’s _your_ hangover?”

Is there something medically wrong with this resident? Arthur doesn’t even know, at this point. “I wasn’t drinking,” he says, slow.

A girl appears, then — one of the three residents who’d deigned to turn up for the first hall meeting, and one of the few who don’t look like they’re dying this morning. She clamps down on Howard and/or Mitchell’s arm in what is clearly an iron grip, from his wince.

“We think he repeatedly threw himself out of his crib onto his head, as a child,” she tells Arthur tartly, pulling her strange, bedraggled friend to his feet. “Come on, idiot; we’re leaving.”

“But we were having such a great conversation,” he objects acerbically as he’s dragged away.

Arthur is used to a more subtle form of rebellion — aside from Cora, but Cora’s always been a special case — from residents, after he’s had to write them up. Dark looks, rolled eyes, muttered remarks. This resident has taken open hostility to a whole new level, and after Arthur did him the favor of not reporting him or calling public safety.

Arthur has no idea what Howard-Jenkins-or-Mitchell-Ballard has against him, but the ever-present sneer that he seems to have reserved for Arthur and Arthur alone has gotten under his skin, more than he’d like to admit.

+

Patrick sleeps in his own room, that night. 

It’s not like he’s far. Patrick’s room is only three doors down from Arthur’s. But he has a roommate, while Arthur has a single with two beds pushed together, so it’s been a long time since they’ve spent a night apart while they’re both on campus.

Arthur sleeps terribly. It’s not ideal. He needs at least eight hours per night in order to properly function, and instead he tosses and turns until dawn, dozes uneasily for several hours, and then wakes with just enough time to rush to the dining hall before class.

Apparently he wasn’t the only student with that idea. The dining hall is a mob scene. Arthur usually rises early enough to eat a leisurely breakfast in an almost-empty dining hall, reviewing his notes for class. This is another experience altogether. He nearly gets run down by a freshman in a rush on the waffle maker, and he staggers out of the line, traumatized and searching for a place to quickly eat his hard-won muesli.

There is one and only one table in the front room that isn’t populated by hordes of chattering freshmen.

It’s Howard and/or Mitchell. The rude one. Naturally.

He’s sitting alone at a table meant for four, staring into his cell phone like it holds the secrets of the universe. There’s a tray of half-eaten food in front of him.

There are undoubtedly tables available in the back dining room. It will take an extra 30 seconds to walk there. Arthur will quickly eat his muesli and drink his chamomile tea in peace at a table near the large picture windows, sitting in the sunshine, and then he’ll go to class. It’s all a very civilized plan that makes perfect sense.

But abruptly, as if he knows he’s being watched, Howard and/or Mitchell looks up. He stares at Arthur in incomprehension, for a split second, and then that familiar sneer blooms across his face. 

Arthur stands there, his skin prickling with a rush of adrenaline. His muesli makes soft noises as it settles into the milk he’d splashed into the bowl. And suddenly, he finds he doesn’t much care about making sense.

His tray makes a noisy clatter when he sets it down, with some force, on the table. He sits down, Howard and/or Mitchell gaping at him, and begins to aggressively chew his breakfast.

“Oh, hell to the no,” Howard and/or Mitchell says, finally. “Hey! I was sitting here!”

“With three empty chairs,” Arthur says blandly, over his mug of tea.

His new breakfast companion sputters. “You can’t just _sit down_ ; didn’t anybody ever teach you cafeteria etiquette in middle school?”

Arthur tilts his head. “Enlighten me,” he says, and he’s treated to Howard and/or Mitchell’s mouth flapping uselessly for a moment, which feels like a victory. Arthur has known him for all of a day but he already has the feeling that he’s rarely at a loss for words. The tips of his ears have gone bright red.

Frankly, though, with the surge of adrenaline fading, Arthur doesn’t know precisely what he’s doing at this table. It’s not like him. Perverse curiosity? Some grim self-flagellation over his decision not to follow the rules and call pub safety? Whatever it was, he’d wanted to irritate Howard and/or Mitchell and show him that he couldn’t be intimidated. An unkind urge, yes, but not an outright hostile one. He hadn’t set out to drive him into red-faced apoplexy.

“Are you Mitchell or Howard?” Arthur asks, a peace offering.

He jerks, eyeing Arthur suspiciously. “What? Is this some obscure British comedy duo or something? Like the _Little Britain_ guys; I never got them—”

Arthur has the distinct impression that if he lets him, Howard and/or Mitchell will talk for days. “Your name. I have the resident list for all of my doubles.”

“Oh.” There is a beat of silence. “I’m Mitch...ell. Mitch- _ell_. It’s French-Canadian.”

“Howard, I presume,” says Arthur, and Howard’s entire face wrinkles.

“It’s Howie,” he says with the sort of studied nonchalance that means he loathes being called Howard. “Not Howard.”

“Hmm,” says Arthur, and he returns his attention to his bowl and his tea.

Howard looks down at Arthur’s food, and then hooks two fingers under the rim of his own tray and jerks it closer to himself, as if Arthur wants to steal his breakfast. If it can be called breakfast at all. His tray contains two powdered-sugar doughnuts, coffee, two hot dogs, and a pile of what looks like shrimp lo mein.

“Good god,” says Arthur faintly. 

“I fought a senior for these,” Howard says, curling a protective hand around the doughnuts.

“I don’t _want_ them,” says Arthur. “Is that really your breakfast?”

“Is that really yours?” Howard shoots back. “Who lives on squished granola bars?”

“It’s muesli,” Arthur says tightly, and he quickly spoons up the last few bites.

“ ‘Muesli.’ Sounds like a sneeze,” Howard mutters, his mouth full of ruinous breakfast.

“Well," says Arthur, rising. "As charming as this meal has been, Howard, I have class."

"Congratulations," says Howard darkly, and Arthur leaves him to his inexplicable bad attitude and equally inexplicable breakfast. There's no accounting for taste.

* * *

“He’s everywhere,” Howie proclaims, sweeping his arms out and nearly knocking Amber’s mocha right off the table. “ _Everywhere._ I saw him on the quad three times yesterday. It’s like he’s following me. He’s probably obsessed!”

“Do you actually think the new RA is obsessed with you?” Amber asks, grabbing her mug and drawing it in closer to herself. Terrace Cafe is busy enough that nobody else seems to even notice the near-miss, students waiting in line and chattering everywhere.

“How closely do you think they psychologically test students before they let them be RAs?” Howie says. “What if this is, like, all some big Stanford prison experiment?”

“Dramatic,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He might be kind of a jerk, but he could have gotten us all in big trouble and he didn’t.”

“Amber,” says Howie, burning with the heat of absolute certainty, “he’s _atrocious_.”

Amber laughs. “Okay,” she says. “But Atrocious Arthur could get you put on probation, so you should probably still act like a human being in front of him.”

“I’m always a human,” Howie protests, but he does, actually, kind of think about it.

+

There is one and only one spot in the library that is perfect in every way. It’s a quiet little alcove on the third floor, tucked away in the back of the stacks. More specifically, it’s in the back of the section devoted to ornithology and bird watching; no one ever comes back there. There’s a coffee table and a comfortable couch that doesn’t match any of the other library furniture, which Howie is convinced some hero of a student probably snuck into the building in the dead of night ten years ago. It’s on the edge of the atrium and the beams of multi-colored light from the multimedia installation in the art gallery downstairs sometimes wash across the couch, giving it a festive look.

Most importantly, it’s right on top of a power outlet. Outlets are in short supply in the library — wherever you find one, you find at least four students sitting on the floor and charging their phones.

When he isn’t in class, meeting Amber for coffee, or watching Netflix in his room with Mitch, Howie’s here. He can kick back, put his feet up, spread out his notes, and bang out whatever paper is due the next day or just zone out and stare at the lights. It’s quiet and it’s his.

And, he discovers as he turns the corner, it has been _invaded_.

Howie stops dead. 

The universe has something against him. It has to. He can’t keep meeting Arthur-the-RA like this.

Good old Artie is sitting there, _on Howie’s couch_ , frowning at his laptop. He’s wearing a red cardigan and no glasses, this time, and there’s a peacoat laid neatly over the back of the sofa. _Peacoats_. Who even wears peacoats and cardigans, aside from, like, sailors and Mr. Rogers?

“What’re you doing?” Howie demands. His tongue feels thick in his mouth.

Arthur glances up, and his eyebrows rise. “Studying,” he says coolly.

“This is my spot,” he persists. “I’ve never seen anyone else here.”

He’s sitting with his laptop balanced neatly on his knees, his feet flat on the floor. Howie is awash — awash! — in hatred again. Who even sits with perfect posture? What is with this dude?

“I don’t think you can lay claim to a public sofa,” says Arthur. “And for the record, I do work here regularly.”

 _No_. Is this Atrocious Artie’s spot too? The injustice of this cruel world. Howie found it first; he had to have!

They stare at each other. From the look on Arthur’s face, Howie is fairly sure that he feels just as strongly about refusing to budge as Howie does.

Shouting ‘finders keepers!’ probably wouldn’t count, by Amber May Clarkian standards, as acting like a human.

“It’s a public space,” Arthur says, finally, with resignment, and he leans over and moves his stupid peacoat.

Howie can easily go back to his room. Mitch will probably be there to hang out with, and even if he isn’t, Howie could raid one of Mitch’s many, many snack stashes and get down to the important business of avoiding writing a discussion paper on the snowman-making Swedes. But at the end of the day, that would let Artie-the-RA _win_.

Howie can’t have that.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he says cheerfully, and he crosses the floor and throws himself down into the space that Arthur has cleared on the sofa. He dumps his backpack and props his sneakers up on the coffee table, crossing one ankle over the other. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Arthur twitch beside him, but he doesn’t comment, so Howie pulls out his phone and starts texting Amber. If he thought he could get away with taking a picture of Arthur for proof without Arthur actually noticing, he’d be all over that, but he settles for texting, _I TOLD YOU_. Amber won’t get it until she escapes class at 3:30, but Howie enjoys the sweet taste of vindication all the same.

Texting accomplished, Howie is painfully conscious of Arthur’s tense shoulder six inches from his. Arthur doesn’t say anything. He seems to be writing a paper, or maybe some really detailed notes. His eyelashes really are super long.

“Can I help you?” Arthur says, without looking up from his computer screen.

He jumps. “Uh, no! Nope! No help for me. No sirree.”

“Right,” says Arthur, and they sit in awkward silence for an hour.

Howie’s life is just freaking aces, man.

* * *

Arthur didn’t begin the day thinking that he’d be single, but it’s how it seems to be ending.

Somehow, he can’t say it’s a surprise.

“You’re certain?” Arthur asks. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed, holding onto his own knees for lack of something to do with his hands.

Patrick is leaning against Arthur’s desk, his arms folded and his face set in tight lines. “Aren’t you? You know this isn’t working.”

Arthur knows. It hasn’t been for a long time now.

It’s all very civilized. The world should feel like it’s spinning or changing in some fundamental way, but instead it’s just Patrick looking at him across the room. He looks unfairly handsome; Arthur has never been able to follow the complicated process that is Patrick’s process for styling his hair, but he seems to have taken particular care with it today.

Arthur’s heart pounds. “We could try to make it work,” he says. 

The trouble with having dated his best friend since they were 16 is that he can _see_ Patrick try to hide his grimace. They know each other all too well. 

“It’s time to let it go, Arthur,” he says. “While we still like each other.”

Arthur snorts softly, and then he closes his eyes and does it again. 

+

The first thing Arthur does is push one of the beds up against the opposite wall.

The second thing he does is pick a bed and curl up with his battered old copy of _The Remains of the Day_ and a mug of tea. He really ought to be working on his open-notes statistics quiz, but if there’s a time to wallow with one's favorite book, it’s likely after the dissolution of a four-year relationship.

There are loud voices in the hall; laughter echoes. The clock has just barely rolled over into quiet hours and Arthur’s not the RA on call, so they’re well within their rights, but it grates all the same. He thinks he hears the buzz of Patrick’s voice under it all.

This is why everyone recommends that you don’t live on the same hall as your boyfriend and his friends, Arthur thinks dully, especially if you’re his RA.

His tea has grown cold, but the microwave is down the hall in the lounge. There’s a thunderous rush of running footsteps in the hallway, followed by shrieks of laughter. He can’t keep sitting here, feeling trapped like a rat in his own room — a room that he essentially shared with Patrick. 

Arthur reaches over and grasps his phone and, after a moment’s consideration, he texts his cousin. _Are you awake?_

Before he can even set his phone down, it’s ringing.

“Arthur?” Kristy says, when he picks up. “Are you okay?”

“Uh.”

She barrels on. “It’s just, you never text, especially after midnight, and I got worried, but maybe I shouldn’t have called; I didn’t wake you up more, did I? Am I just being paranoid? You can tell me, that’ll be okay—”

“Kristy,” says Arthur, and she stops short. “Could I sleep on your couch?”

She sucks in a sharp breath. “Of course.” They’re both quiet for a moment, and then she asks, hesitant, “Arthur?”

“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll be there soon.”

Kristy greets him with a hug at the door of her suite in Mahoney, then insistently pulls him inside. The decor is … something, as it always is — she lives with a suite full of elementary school teachers in training, several of whom are student-teaching this semester, and there always seems to be a surfeit of glitter in their common room.

There’s a rather horrifying motivational cat poster; that’s new. So is the pile of pillows and blankets that have been prepared for him on the couch. Several look disturbingly fluffy.

“Is everything okay with Patrick?” Kristy asks, once she’s pulled the door closed behind him. 

“We broke up.” It’s a matter-of-fact statement and he delivers it that way, but it makes his breath catch in his throat all the same. There was a time when Arthur hadn’t been able to picture a future without Patrick in it. They’d planned to continue a long-distance relationship when Arthur eventually convinced his parents to pay for his education even after a transfer to Berklee College of Music — a dream that Patrick always said was unrealistic but had been willing to support, and that now seems more unlikely with every passing day.

Arthur had harbored thoughts about a tiny, well-appointed studio apartment in Boston, once Patrick graduated and came east to join him; maybe a dog, if Patrick could be talked into leaving behind the infernal hell-cat that currently lives at his parents’ house.

It’s not going to happen. Berklee, Patrick, the dog, making a living as a musician. Arthur is here, alone, with almost three-quarters of a degree in business administration.

There must be something in Arthur’s face despite his best efforts, because Kristy’s eyes widen. “Oh _Arthur_!” Before she’s even finished saying his name, she has dragged him back down. For someone who’s at least six inches shorter than Arthur, Kristy is tremendously strong; her arms lock tight around his neck, and he lets himself fold down to stiffly hug her back.

“You’re hugging, so I’m guessing he’s not here to yell at us,” says a voice. Arthur glances over Kristy’s shoulder and finds one of Kristy’s suitemates watching them warily from the kitchen. 

“Nikki! No, of course not!” Kristy defends him staunchly, while refusing to release him from the hug.

It’s a bit much — Kristy’s branch of the family tree runs wild with its physical affection; Arthur’s does not — but. It’s nice all the same.

* * *

On Thursday, when Cora Caldwell, the weirdest classmate of all time, comes careening through the door and chucks her backpack halfway across the room, it ends up at the desk in front of Howie. 

Howie didn’t know what the hell to think of Cora when she showed up to the first day of class, in a lime green coat that looks like it was skinned off a yak, and immediately started complaining about the syllabus, but he came around _very_ quickly after the day that she asked the professor why it was always women who had their tits out in the movies that they watched. Not that Howie’s complaining about boobs, because, boobs, right? (Cora was also, apparently, not complaining about boobs. That's one way to announce your bisexuality to an entire class.) But ‘equal opportunity nudity’ is still easily the best phrase Howie has ever heard someone yell in a class. 

It turns out Cora’s the best kind of classmate: she stirs shit in new and entertaining ways every week, she sasses professors, and she actually knows what she’s talking about, so it doesn’t feel like a giant waste of time (except in the great ways) when she drags the class off topic.

Not that he’s ever said a word to her. Howie’s M.O. in classes is to sit in the back, make the occasional smart remark, do enough to get a solid B or C, and skate by without getting called out; the opposite of Cora’s life motto, clearly.

She glances back at him and says, “Hey,” as she drops into the chair. She’s attractive, in a … terrifying kind of way. She has so many piercings. Howie tries not to stare at them.

He opens his mouth intending to say a casual 'hey' back, but instead, he says, “Did those hurt? That’s so many holes in your face.”

“Wow,” drawls Cora. “Now there’s a novel question I’ve never gotten before.”

“If novel’s what you’re looking for, I can do novel,” Howie says. “Do you ever think about how the Planeteers got assigned their elements?”

Cora, somewhat alarmingly, turns around fully in her chair. “Not really,” she says, “but you have my attention now.”

“Like, how did that one kid get _heart_?” Howie says, warming to his subject. “What kind of a superpower is heart? Did the spirit of the planet just give up? Did she hand out rings randomly or what?”

“I’m pretty sure the kid with the water ring was a marine biologist and the kid who was all about farming had the earth ring,” Cora says. “But that doesn’t explain the monkey.”

“The monkey!” Howie hisses in agreement, and then Professor Soucie calls class to order.

Cora doesn’t turn around, though. She keeps looking at Howie, her head tilted. He isn’t sure how he feels about being the target of her attention. She sticks out her hand. “Cora.”

“Howie,” he says, and, after carefully eyeing her hand for a second, he shakes it.

+

Arthur-the-RA looks like death.

He’s in Howie’s library hideaway again, and that catches Howie’s attention, yes, but mostly: the death.

“Wow,” says Howie, flinging his backpack down. “Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

Arthur’s sweater is buttoned wrong by one button, all the way down, the lapels hanging askew. His hair doesn’t look half as neatly-trimmed as it usually does. There’s a geometry class’s worth of dark circles under his eyes. He hasn’t shaved. He still looks more put-together than at least half of Howie’s classmates, but something is clearly very wrong in the world of Atrocious Artie.

Arthur starts, at Howie’s voice, and nearly knocks his laptop right off the sofa. Howie lunges and manages to catch the screen and shove it back into Arthur’s lap. 

“Howard,” says Arthur, blinking owlishly. Howie feels the rage trying to rise in him at the use of his full name, but the mystery has him preoccupied. He thinks he probably ought to feel vindicated by the sight of Arthur in total disarray, but the guy looks impressively miserable. It's not fair. Howie should be able to enjoy this. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

“You look like death,” Howie says baldly. “Possibly of the warmed over variety.”

Arthur looks at him strangely, for a second, and then he gives a huff of breath that Howie thinks might be … amused? What is this world coming to. “I stayed with my cousin last night,” he says. “The hospitality was appreciated but being woken early by someone singing Disney songs in the shower was not.”

“Ouch,” Howie says. “Was it at least good Disney?”

“Define good Disney.”

“The nineties.”

“Then no,” says Arthur, with feeling. “It was … modern.”

“The horror,” says Howie, and he thinks Arthur very nearly smiles. He looks much more friendly, when he almost smiles. Inviting, almost. Like he isn’t the second coming of Satan (the first being Heather Grimsby).

Howie clears his throat and digs into his bag for his laptop.

+

Howie makes it through ten minutes and at least 16 yawns from Arthur, all of which Howie unwillingly mimics because freaking _yawning_ , man, that shit is contagious like herpes, before he cracks. He slaps his laptop closed. “I’ll be back,” he says. “Don’t let anyone steal my stuff.”

“That presumes someone would want it,” Arthur points out. His voice is thick and sleepy; his head has been lolling in the opposite direction, away from Howie. 

“Seriously,” Howie says. “Guard it with your life.”

“Okay,” Arthur says dubiously.

+

Arthur is on the phone when Howie comes back from the library cafe with two steaming disposable cups in hand. Arthur has a flip phone — of course he does. He’s holding the phone with one hand and pinching the bridge of his nose with the other.

“It’s fine,” he’s saying. His eyes are closed and Howie is getting the impression that even if he _was_ looking, (a) he’s not wearing contacts today, and (b) he’s blind as a bat without corrective lenses.

Still, Howie slows down.

Arthur sighs at the person on the other end of the phone. “It’s a break-up, not a funeral.”

A break-up? 

Before today, Howie would have said he felt bad for the girl. He still does, kind of, but hearing the first signs of what’s maybe a dry sense of humor under all that cold awkwardness, seeing Arthur sit there alone and needing a shave… Well. Maybe he's a human after all. Ugh.

Howie scuffs his shoe, and Arthur looks up, clearly startled. “Look, I’m fine,” he says into the phone, his eyes on Howie. “I have to go; I have class. Thank you for calling.”

“That was some pretty decent lying,” Howie says, as Arthur puts down his phone. “You’re a regular smooth criminal.”

“Technically, it wasn’t a lie. I do have class. I’m just not attending it.”

“You’re a loner, Dottie, a rebel,” Howie says, and he almost laughs at the puzzled little wrinkle that forms between Arthur’s eyebrows. He really does look pathetic. “It’s a Pee-Wee Herman thing, don’t worry about it. So.” He holds up the spare cup. “I figured you were probably a black coffee kind of guy, but I also stuffed, like, half of Terrace Cafe’s supply of sugar packets in my pockets, so if you need a sugar pusher, I’m your man.”

Arthur looks overwhelmed, and still confused. “You brought me coffee?” he asks slowly. ‘Coffee’ sounds like an alien word in his mouth.

“I brought you caffeine,” Howie says, because he’s not hearing appropriate gratitude yet. “The lifeblood of the college student. The magical elixir that runs through all our veins.”

“I don’t actually drink coffee,” says Arthur, though he has the manners to at least sound apologetic. 

“The way I see it, you have two choices,” Howie says.

Arthur’s eyebrows rise. “Oh?”

“You can either drink it, or _I’ll_ drink it, after I’ve already drank mine, and then I’ll be so caffeine-high that I’ll start singing Disney songs, probably. The new ones.”

He cracks a faint smile; the first that Howie has seen from him. “Well, we can’t have that.” He takes the cup from Howie. He winces after he takes the first sip and again even after he carefully tips in one single sugar packet, but he’s clearly _trying_ in a way that Howie wasn’t prepared for.

It’s easier not thinking of him as a person — instead, as some kind of super-RA jerk robot — but maybe Amber was right. Amber is, sometimes unfortunately for Howie, almost always right. Maybe Howie needs to celebrate personhood, or whatever.

So Howie sits beside Arthur, and manfully doesn’t make fun of him for grimacing with every drink of coffee he takes, and, fine. Maybe he doesn't hate it.

* * *

Arthur has a Skype call with his parents once a week. They've gotten it down to a routine, by now. Arthur asks polite questions about the neighbors and the store, and his father tells him about whatever his sister forgot to mention in her sporadic update emails about her life with her new husband. His mother likes to hear about Arthur’s classes. It’s all become much less fraught since he stopped pressing about the possibility of being allowed to transfer to Berklee. Arthur spends at least half of every conversation wanting to beat his head against his desk.

This Friday, he makes the call with a box sitting under his desk. It contains, as far as he can tell, every tangible hint of their relationship that Patrick could find in his dorm room. 

He doesn’t know for sure what’s in it, because he’d only just taken off the lid when his parents called, but on even that quick glance, he saw a favorite sweater that disappeared two years ago and Patrick always claimed he hadn’t seen, so today is going swimmingly already.

“Arthur,” says his father, with that particular tone that means he’s repeated himself several times and is running out of patience, and Arthur yanks his eyes away from the box at his feet. “Are we boring you?”

“Oh Art, don’t tease him,” says his mom.

“Patrick and I broke up,” he says abruptly. He’d planned to ease into the news, maybe even wait a few weeks, because _he knew_ how awkward it would be, but it sort of just … falls out of his mouth.

Sure enough, it’s like he’s dropped a bomb into the conversation. His parents go silent. His dad’s eyebrows have raised; his mother’s mouth is hanging open, a bit. 

Arthur can see where this would be a shock to them. He came out when he was 16 so he could be with Patrick. They’ve been dating for as long as his family has known he’s been gay. As far as they know, the relationship has been going beautifully. 

That’s what Arthur reminds himself, anyway, as the painfully silent seconds tick by.

“Oh Arthur, I’m so sorry,” says his mom, finally. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and at her dubious look, he smiles and adds, “Really. I am. Thank you.”

He knows it’s probably coming, but he thinks he can still feel his face turn a little bit purple when his dad says, “That’s a shame. But maybe there’s a silver lining — now you’ll have more time for your classes.”

“Art,” his mom tries, her voice sharp, because she’s definitely the source of all diplomacy in the family, but Arthur has had enough.

“I take plenty of time for my classes,” he says, evenly. “But I’ll keep your advice in mind, Dad; thank you.” What advice? Who knows? Arthur just needs to cut Dad off at the pass before he starts on one of his rants about how Arthur didn’t need to go and become an RA, Dad would have paid for his room and board too, etc. etc. “I’ve actually got an econ paper to work on, but I’ll talk to you next week.”

“Good boy,” says his dad, approving.

“Why don’t you come home for a visit this weekend?” his mom asks, her eyes still worried. “You’re so close by, and we miss you.”

Arthur swallows his initial impulse, which is: God, no. “I’m sorry, I’m on call over the weekend,” he says, and he doesn’t feel even the slightest bit bad about lying. 

He closes the laptop before his parents have fully finished saying goodbye. 

He could go to Kristy’s suite, but if he has to sit through another viewing of _Sweet Home Alabama_ , Arthur can’t be held responsible for his actions. 

The library it is.

+

Arthur’s favorite spot on the third floor has become a veritable party zone, recently. It’s disconcerting, after years of holing up by himself in this quiet corner, to have found other students here multiple times in the last week. And this time, it isn’t Howie — it’s two strangers spread across the couch, each leaning over a laptop, talking and laughing at a volume that really isn’t appropriate for a library.

Arthur sighs, and he’s ready, really, to find a seat at one of the tables that are spread throughout the front stacks, but then Howie Jenkins comes around the corner and stops dead in his tracks.

“Hey,” Howie says, to the two students sitting on the couch. “My stuff was here.”

“Oh, yeah,” says one of the boys, barely breaking away from his conversation long enough to point at a crumpled pile of backpack and coat on the floor.

“It was on the couch,” Howie persists. “Because I left it there. To hold the couch. I was gone for, like, 30 seconds.”

“Finders keepers,” says the other guy, rolling his eyes, because this is apparently grade school.

Howie seems deeply affronted. “That’s what _I_ thought!” he insists. “That was my idea!”

As is often the case, Arthur has no idea what Howie is talking about. “It’s all right,” he says, and as he catches Howie’s arm, the muscle jumps beneath his hand. “I have a better idea.”

“This place is mathematically perfect!” Howie insists. “There’s nothing better!”

+

Sitting at the counter of the local 24-hour diner, Howie says, “I lied, this is better.” He’s staring at his enormous mound of chocolate chip pancakes as he says it.

“Mathematically speaking?” Arthur asks. 

“E equals MC squared, mofo,” confirms Howie, digging into his food, and Arthur finds himself grinning. “Did you really come to the most beautiful all-night diner of all time,” (that description is pushing it; this is a perfectly serviceable but pedestrian truck stop), “and order _a salad_?”

“I enjoy the ambiance,” Arthur says loyally, “but the menu is a laminated heart attack.”

“A delicious, delicious heart attack.” Howie gazes lovingly at his pancakes. “I can’t believe I never knew this place existed. Everyone who never told me about it is fired. Fired!”

The diner is just far enough from the heart of campus that it doesn’t see the kind of university foot traffic that the more popular student haunts do. It’s draped in kitschy, 1950s-style decor, which Arthur once had to talk a drunk senior out of trying to steal off the wall. There’s one other group of university students sitting at a table by the back door now, and a couple of truckers sitting further down the bar with enormous mugs of coffee, but otherwise, the diner is quiet. Howie’s voice carries.

Arthur doesn’t care, he finds.

“It’s a closely-guarded secret among ResLife staff,” he says. “Guard it well.”

“With my life,” Howie promises, a gleam of deranged zealotry in his eye. 

When Howie isn’t drunk and shouting rude, incomprehensible bon mots about dragons — or sober and wreaking a path of destruction through flapjacks; this is one of the least sexy things Arthur has ever seen — he’s cute. Blandly so, at first glance. He’s certainly attractive, but not in a way that leads him to immediately stand out head and shoulders above the rest on a campus full of brown-haired boys wearing hoodies and ironic-slogan T-shirts. 

But there’s something about Howie, the longer Arthur looks. 

A mocking tilt to his head and clever set to his mouth, even when he’s at rest. Sharp brown eyes. He’s funny and utterly unpredictable and never at a loss for words, and unlike anyone Arthur has ever met.

And he watches Arthur like he can’t look away, even when he tries to hide it.

“...Do I have something on my face,” Howie says around a giant mouthful of pancakes, after they’ve both been looking at each other for a long moment. It’s an obvious deflection.

“Half the bottle of maple syrup, possibly,” says Arthur, and Howie laughs, the hunted look melting away. He reaches for a napkin and haphazardly wipes across his mouth. 

“Suave and maple syrup-y since 1992: the Howie Jenkins story.” There’s a hesitation, so slight that Arthur almost doesn’t notice it, and then Howie is pulling out his iPhone. “I’m gonna put you in my phone as Mrs. Butterworth,” he threatens.

“I’m shocked and appalled,” says Arthur, and he recites his phone number for Howie.

“Just in case some more library punks need telling off and one of us needs to call for back-up,” Howie says, thumbs flying. It might just be the thinnest pretext by which a boy has ever asked for Arthur's number, but Arthur will allow it. Arthur’s phone buzzes with an incoming text in his coat pocket, and Howie sets his phone down. “Damn library punks. That was a perfectly good ornithology section before they showed up.”

“I don’t think the last pair of library punks was appropriately cowed. Our approach may need work.”

“Hey,” says Howie, pointing at him, “I'm willing to put the work in; you need to step up your game, Artie my man.”

No one has called Arthur 'Artie,' much less 'Artie my man,' in his entire life. Arthur snorts a laugh. “Up the threatening quotient. I'll keep it in mind.”

Howie smiles — a real smile, not the self-deprecating, mocking smirk that Arthur has come to recognize.

The longer Arthur looks, the more he likes what he sees.

\+ 

Arthur drops Howie off in the parking lot between their two buildings. There's a text waiting by the time he unlocks his bedroom door. _Strategy: mini maple syrup catapults._

 _Sounds perfectly diabolical_ , Arthur texts. _What for?_

_Defending our turf, obviously. Keep up, Butterworth._

Perhaps the day didn't turn out so badly, after all.

* * *

The dining hall at 5:30 PM is not for the faint of heart. You have to claw your way through a horde of hungry students to reach the station with freshly-made tater tots, and Howie’s not afraid to throw an elbow to do it. A little (mostly) friendly jockeying never hurt anybody. 

Except, apparently, for the person who squeaks when Howie is knocked into her.

“Sorry,” he says, and then he turns and realizes he almost knocked over the sweetest RA in Mahoney Hall — nay, on all of west campus. “Oooooh, oh no, _KQ_?”

Kristy Quincy is laughing, so hopefully she’s okay? She’s, like, always laughing and smiling, though, so it’s hard to say. “It’s okay!” she assures him. “I’m fine, really! You barely even stepped on me.”

“Milady,” he says, sketching a small bow, “a thousand apologies.” He gets thumped soundly in the back by somebody behind him, and he quickly reaches for the ladle while there’s an opening. He grandly gestures with the ladle at Kristy’s plate, and she giggles and nods, so Howie gives her the gift of tater tots before filling his own plate.

“How’s your semester been?” she asks, as they elbow their way out of the line.

“Oh, you know, fantabulous and magical all around,” says Howie. “What brings you to this fine and not-at-all violent dining establishment?”

“I’m supposed to meet Reddy — that’s my boyfriend.”

Boyfriend. Kristy is hot and bubbly and friendly and blonde; Howie should probably feel … he doesn’t know, disappointed or something, right?

“But I think he’s late…” Kristy trails off, and she brightens. “Come on, you should come eat with us!”

Howie’s original plan was to smuggle out the tots. He even picked up napkins and wore a hoodie with deep pockets for this heist. But Kristy is the nicest person alive, and Howie still owes her after the time she cheerfully saved him from a washing machine in the laundry room that was, like, foaming at the mouth, so he can do dinner.

He follows Kristy to a table full of girls. So many hot girls. Several of them look askance at him, as a strange dude sitting down with a napkin full of tots, but they seem to accept it when Kristy chirps, “This is Howie!” and then rattles off all of their names. Howie wonders how often she picks up and brings home stray residents. Probably a lot.

“Is your cousin crashing on the couch again, Kristy?” asks one of the girls. Howie thinks her name was Serena. Sarah? There were a bunch of S names. Exhibit A of why Howie consistently fails with the ladies.

“Why _has_ he been staying with you guys?” asks another girl. “Doesn’t he have his own room?”

“He just broke up with his boyfriend and it’s been really hard,” Kristy says. Of course she’s defending the guy; she truly is the nicest person alive. “They live together on a hall with all of his ex-boyfriend’s friends.”

A wave of winces rolls through the group. Howie agrees with the girls — that’s bad news bears. “First rule of sophomore year,” proclaims one of the girls. “Never live on a hall with the boyfriend.”

“They were together for a long time,” says Kristy staunchly. “Arthur just needs a little time away, and…” She keeps talking, but her voice has faded into the _wah-wah-wah_ muted trumpet sound that the adults make in _Peanuts_ movies.

There can’t possibly be more than a handful of 20-somethings on this campus named Arthur. It’s the old man-iest of names. Having a university full of Arthurs would be like a university full of Melvins.

“ _Arthur_ Arthur?” Howie interrupts. From the look that the entire table turns on him, he possibly has a wild glint in his eyes. “Peacoat and angry-RA Arthur?”

“I mean, I don’t think he’s an especially angry person,” says Kristy slowly, which answers Howie’s question, and Howie is, just. Arthur is Kristy's cousin. Arthur is gay? Arthur is gay. _Arthur is gay_.

Arthur just got out of a long relationship.

Arthur is gay.

The blood is pounding in Howie’s ears. 

“Howie, I didn’t know you know Arthur!” Kristy crows, and she is already starting to look more delighted than Howie can handle.

“Only — a little; just kind of, he stole my spot.” Howie pushes his chair back. “He’s a spot-stealer from way back, KQ; better watch out for that. Anyway, I better go — tots to eat, forks to steal. You know how it is.” He nods to the table, says, “Ladies,” and books it the fuck out of there.

Arthur’s breakup was with a guy.

That doesn’t matter, right? Why would it matter. Who cares. Not Howie, that’s for sure. They’re not even friends. Sure, Howie has started texting Arthur pictures of his meals just for the hilarity of Arthur’s responses, but that’s a friend _ly_ thing, not a friend thing.

It’s fine. It’s all fine.

+

Arthur texts, later. Howie, eating the last of a pile of cold tater tots and watching some classic _Buffy_ with Amber, glances at his screen and then flips the phone back over again. 

“Is that Mitch or your mom?” Amber asks.

“Brutal, but fair,” Howie allows. “Neither; it’s no big. It’s just a thing for class. Group project, you know how we do.”

The moment feels big, somehow, but Amber doesn't even blink.

* * *

Howie is woken at o’dark thirty by the shrill wail of a distant fire alarm. He has a moment to feel smug over another building’s misfortune, wrapped snugly in his comforter, and then the Mahoney alarm shrieks and the in-room alarm’s red light starts flashing.

Mitch groans, across the room. It’s a pretty impressive zombie groan, actually. It could be a sound effect on _The Walking Dead_. 

“God why,” Howie moans into his pillow. Zombie-Mitch grunts in obvious agreement. “Here’s an idea, just a thought — what if we just stayed here; I’m, like, 80% sure we won’t die in a fire. Even if we did, worth it.”

“ ‘Kay,” mumbles Mitch, clearly already halfway back to sleep despite the whooping alarm and the flashing lights, but then somebody starts pounding on all the doors, so Howie finally sighs and fishes under the bed for his parka.

+

It’s freezing outside on the quad, the frozen grass overflowing with angry, half-asleep underclassmen. It’s 3:30 in the morning. The sky is pitch black, no stars to be seen; it’s probably going to start snowing any second now. Whoever ran down the line of dorm buildings to pull one fire alarm after another, or orchestrated some kind of synchronized alarm-pulling scheme, is the worst person in all of existence. 

Howie huddles with Amber, who first mocked him for carrying a fleece blanket outside with which to dramatically drape himself, but then finally demanded a share of the blanket once they’d been outside for ten minutes with no sign of being allowed back inside any time soon. It’s pure chaos all around them — the alarms were pulled for three adjacent buildings, so there are hundreds of students massed together on the lawn, the dull roar of grumpy conversation carrying. The RAs and ResLife staff are rushing around with clipboards, taking attendance and herding away the occasional fed-up student who tries to wander back into a building. They’re like those sheep dogs from _Babe_.

“TV and movies gave me a very different picture of college life,” Howie complains. Amber’s elbow is sharp against his side, but he can handle a little pain in exchange for BFF shared body heat. “I thought it was supposed to be all parties and triumphant montages.”

“Nope,” says Amber. “Instead, it’s the Jan-Term Serial Fire Alarm Puller and many, many adult firefighters who can’t figure out how to turn off a simple alarm.”

“‘Jan-Term Serial Fire Alarm Puller. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?” Howie muses.

“Shut up, you,” says Amber, jabbing him more purposefully with her pointy, pointy elbow. “It’s almost four in the morning. I'm not at my most verbose.”

“How many firefighters does it take to change a lightbulb?” Mitch asks thoughtfully.

“I still think this calls for a stakeout,” Howie says. “Come on, half of Sigrundson Hall is computer science majors; can’t we get a little Big Brother surveillance happening?”

Amber ignores him. “At least 16, apparently,” she says to Mitch. The colder Amber gets, the saltier she gets. “Mitchell, you have gloves; why aren’t you wearing them?”

“My fingers were hot.” Mitch Ballard: a poet among men. 

“Your fingers are going to fall off, if you’re not careful.”

“I mean, if you want me to wear them, then I’ll wear them,” Mitch says, and honestly, Howie is going to throw up all over both of them. He glances away.

That’s how Howie spots Arthur. 

He’s standing maybe 20 feet away with his dorky clipboard tucked under his arm. He doesn’t seem to be actively clipboarding, anymore; instead, he’s just … standing. Arthur is noticeable because, in the general crush of tired humanity, there’s open space around him. 

He’s watching a knot of people, Howie realizes. Five or six friends, all talking and laughing together, sharing blankets and, in one impressive instance, coats. 

Howie doesn’t know how to classify the look on Arthur’s face, other than ‘not great.’ Lonely, maybe. Wistful. It’s all very subtle, because Arthur’s not exactly a guy of sweeping, dramatic emotions and facial expressions, but Howie can see it all the same.

Howie’s heart clenches.

One of the boys who Arthur is watching turns in the general direction of Harrison Hall and, by extension, Arthur. Arthur raises his clipboard in a hurry and gives every impression that he’s suddenly deeply invested in his headcount again.

Howie can’t watch this. It’s just sad. He shrugs out from under the fleece blanket, bequeathing it to Amber, and he picks his way across the frozen tundra of the quad. Absorbed in his farce of a headcount, Arthur doesn’t look up until Howie stops in front of him, hands shoved in his pockets, and says, “Hey.”

Arthur blinks, and then he looks up. He smiles when he sees Howie, just a little bit at the corners of his mouth. “Hello.”

“That was some fancy RA-ing, earlier.”

“If I learn nothing else from my four years here, I’ll always treasure my ability to count students in constant motion,” says Arthur. His breath forms a thin white cloud that dissipates with time. His nose and cheeks are pink in the cold.

“You’re selling the skillz short; you can also bust up parties like a pro,” says Howie, and as Arthur finally cracks a smile, Cora Caldwell comes out of nowhere, with Kristy Quincy hot on her heels.

“Arthur,” says Cora, “are the firefighters just sitting in there with their thumbs up their asses or what?”

“Charming and evocative, as ever,” Arthur says to her.

This is not a small campus. Howie has no idea how everyone he knows also knows everyone else.

“What,” he says, looking between Cora and Arthur. “How…?”

“You’re looking at the scourge of Harrison Hall,” says Cora. “More specifically, Arthur’s hall.”

“I’m sure you’re not a scourge!” Kristy says.

“I assure you, Kristy, you’re incorrect,” says Arthur, clearly on comfortable ground now, and Cora grins with all her teeth.

“Cora Caldwell, professional scourge,” she says, offering her hand to Kristy.

“Kristy Quincy, RA?” Kristy says, a little dubiously, and she shakes Cora’s hand before she turns to Arthur. “How are you?” Kristy is lovely and sweet and not at all subtle — several times in a row, she glances toward the group that Howie is assuming is Arthur’s ex-boyfriend and his friends. 

Apparently Howie’s not the only one who thought Arthur could use a rescue.

Arthur’s face takes on a pinched look. “Fine, thank you,” he says. 

“Sooo,” says Howie, “how ‘bout those firefighters, huh?”

Later, when the alarms finally stop blaring and the much-maligned fire department gives the all clear, Howie winds up trudging back inside alongside Amber and Mitch.

Amber is giving him a funny look as they climb the stairs. “What?” he asks, paranoid.

“Wasn’t that Atrocious Arthur?”

Howie’s heart starts to pound. “Yeah, _that guy_ ; atrocious as ever.” He shrugs. He is so extremely casual. “Just needed to talk to Cora from my film class. Oh, look, there's your door; night!”

It's not the most graceful of exits, but it gets the job done.

* * *

Patrick made sense. He was erudite, cultured, steady. He and Arthur grew up in the same sleepy hometown. They were out together for four years. Patrick was going to be an art restorer; Arthur was going to be a musician, even if that seems less likely every day now. They were compatible. 

Howie Jenkins is pure chaos. He speaks constant nonsense. He doesn’t seem to have any sort of goals in life; he’s obviously both directionless and desperately unhappy. He must spend more time texting Arthur — his subject of the afternoon: who invented double-sided tape, and why — than doing his homework. He’s clearly not out, and just as clearly not okay with being queer.

And still, Arthur finds himself going about his days with his phone close at hand. He feels warm with anticipation every time it buzzes with the notification of an incoming text. More often than not, he laughs at whatever it contains. 

Howie is funny and impossibly clever, even if he seems averse to the idea of turning that imagination on his actual coursework. He’s occasionally aggravating and always interesting. Arthur likes spending time with him. It doesn’t, Arthur tells himself, have to be more complicated than that.

Howie goes home for the weekend, and, if anything, the frequency of his texts increases. Arthur spends Friday night on-duty in Mahoney and Saturday night in Harrison, roaming the halls on his rounds, convincing students to turn down their music and, on one regrettable occasion, calling the EMTs to help an underage resident who’d obviously had far too much to drink. Kristy checks up on him and he avoids Patrick like the plague, and he texts. He texts a lot. More than he ever probably has, on his old cell phone. 

When he finds himself considering getting a phone with a slide-out keyboard, Arthur knows this may be going a bit far.

+

On Sunday night, Howie announces his return to campus with a text in all capital letters. Arthur laughs softly to himself and lifts his phone to take a photo of what’s in front of him — the rows of bookshelves, the coffee table full of his notes on the outline for his paper, the darkness out the windows overlooking the library lawn. 

_Your phone takes the saddest pictures_ , Howie says. _It’s almost as sad as you spending the whole weekend in the library._

 _Fine. And what did you do this weekend?_ Arthur texts back.

_Hung out with my biffle._

_Your … what?_

_Get with the times, man! My bestie. My one and only. My best girl._

Arthur thinks, he _thinks_ , Howie is referring to his best friend, a girl named Amber who Arthur has heard about at great length. _Your mother?_ he asks.

There is a lengthy pause. It's long enough for Arthur to go back to his work, and long enough to start to grow concerned that Howie took offense; that his dry ribbing didn’t translate in a text-only format.

Then: “That was savage,” announces Howie. Arthur looks up. Howie is rounding the corner carting his backpack, his face pink and hair wild from the wind. “Totally uncalled-for.”

“But correct?” Arthur teases, as Howie flings himself down onto the couch beside him.

“No,” says Howie, rolling his eyes. “I was with my actual best friend, Amber, who is _not_ my mom.” He strips out of his coat and tosses it on the floor, and he starts to reach for his backpack but then freezes. “Wait. Was that a ‘your mom’ joke?” He turns to look at Arthur, his gaze intent and incredulous. “Did you just _your-mom_ me?” 

Arthur considers it. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose I did.” 

The ensuing delight from Howie carries on for the next 15 minutes, until Arthur manages to convince him that he really does need to write a paper, and they both subside into their laptops, side by side.

Arthur gets extremely negligible amounts of work done, when Howie is around. He can sense Howie watching him out of the corner of his eye; he imagines he can almost feel Howie's gaze like a physical touch. He's sitting very close.

Arthur has only managed to write two sentences when there’s a burst of loud voices, and then two familiar faces turn the corner. It’s the pair of seniors who’d taken their spot, last week: the library punks themselves.

The library punks pull up short when they see Arthur and Howie already sat on the sofa. 

Slowly, deliberately, Howie puts one foot on the coffee table, then the other, crossing his legs at the ankle and folding his arms over his chest. He’s staring the two of them down all the while.

After a moment, Arthur closes his laptop and does the same.

“Ugh, whatever,” says one of the library punks, and he mutters, “Weirdos,” as the pair of them turn tail and leave.

“Did you see that?” Howie crows, and he kicks Arthur’s nearer foot. “They were cowed!”

“Appropriately so,” Arthur agrees.

“Look at you, with your feet on the table,” says Howie, and he taps Arthur’s shoe with his own again, more lightly this time. “You rebel, you.”

Arthur laughs softly, and turns to Howie.

They’re still sitting closely together, tilted toward each other with their feet almost pressed together. There’s a low buzz of distant, soft conversation, muffled by the shelves and shelves of books surrounding them. It feels like they’re alone in the world.

Howie looks at Arthur’s mouth. It’s a split second but it’s unmistakable, his eyes flicking down and back up again. There’s naked want in his face.

“Howie,” Arthur murmurs, and he leans in and catches Howie’s jaw in both hands, and he kisses him. Howie makes a quiet noise into his mouth, like he’s been caught trying to talk and kiss at the same time, and then he grabs two fistfuls of Arthur’s shirt and kisses him back. It’s careful, and clumsy, and nice all the same.

“You didn’t call me Howard,” Howie says dumbly, when Arthur leans back. His hands are still in Arthur’s shirt, warm against his sides through the thin layer of fabric.

Arthur hums, low. “Howie suits you,” he says, and he’s treated to the long, slow bloom of Howie’s smile.

* * *

Howie kissed a dude last night.

That’s what he keeps coming back to, over and over again, like a brain broken record. He played footsie with a dude in the library, the lights from the downstairs art installation washing across his face all artistically, and then he … well, technically Howie didn’t kiss him; Arthur started it. That makes it less gay, right?

Howie kissed _Arthur_ , twice. It feels like a stranger did it. Like Howie had an out-of-body experience, and somebody jumped in and wore him like a skin-suit and kissed a dude, a _dude_ , holy fuck he kissed a dude and he liked it. It’s just like the song. Minus the Chapstick.

He was already starting to have a good old-fashioned freak-out by the time Arthur had said he needed to get home. Howie’s not sure what had sent him all tizzy-licious the most — knowing what he’d just done, or Arthur leaving afterward. Was Arthur leaving because he was bored? Did Howie do it wrong? _Could_ you gay-kiss wrong? Could gay guys could sense weakness with their mouths??

Howie had been mid-ramblitude panic, on the inside, when Arthur finished putting on his peacoat and kissed him again. His mouth was warm and his hand was on Howie’s knee and Howie’s whole brain just went … quiet.

Howie could use another dose of that quiet now. He’s been staring at the wall throughout his film class, mostly thinking about how big Arthur’s hands had felt on his face and the way Howie had heard his breath hitch, and how Howie hadn’t hated it. Cora has spent the entire class looking at him strangely, and then flicking pens at his head whenever the professor was writing on the whiteboard. She has, like, an unending supply of pens. Interdimensional pocket full of only pens?

“Ow!” he hisses, as Cora’s aim proves true yet again. The pen bounces off his head and into the aisle between desks. The guy sitting on Howie’s other side looks like he seriously regrets his choice of seat. “Where are you even getting them all from?!”

“What’s wrong with you?” she hisses back. “You look like somebody hit you in the face with a shovel.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Howie says. “No shovels!”

Their professor clears her throat.

+

Howie should probably call or text. Arthur texts hilariously slowly, with perfect grammar and punctuation, and absolutely no emojis. Howie lives for Arthur’s texts. 

Instead, he looks Arthur up in the online student directory. 

As Howie strongly suspected, there are very few ‘Arthurs’ on-campus who aren’t 60-year-old psychology professors, and only one in the entire junior class. Apparently, his real last name is Kraft.

Howie sits at his desk and mentally pours one out for the wistful thought of Arthur’s last name actually, coincidentally, being Butterworth.

Then he gets up and goes over to Harrison Hall before he can lose his nerve.

Up and down Arthur’s hall, there are print-outs and notes and inexplicable signs taped to doors. Howie knows he’s found Arthur’s room when he stops in front of the door that’s neat as a pin.

He knocks. He’s going to vibrate out of his skin. He’s going to have an attack of the heart variety. He’s not going to make it through this. But he has to know. He has to … maybe kiss Arthur again? Fucking a. He has no idea what he’s going to say or do. 

Arthur isn’t answering his door.

Howie keeps knocking.

“Oh my _god_ ,” yells a girl, muffled. “Would you give it a r—” Cora flings open the door across the hall. She blinks at Howie.

“It’s you,” says Cora. “And you have shovel-face.” She looks at him for another second or two, and then slowly but surely her face splits into a terrible rictus grin.

Okay, fine, maybe it’s just a normal devious grin. So sue Howie.

“Is shovel-face for _Kraft_?”

“You’re lucky I just learned that’s his last name,” Howie says weakly. “I could’ve thought you were talking about macaroni and cheese.” He doesn’t _mean_ to confirm that Arthur is the cause of any and all shovel-faces; it just sort of … comes out.

“This is the best thing that’s happened to me all week,” says Cora. “Hands down. He’s not here, though, Romeo.”

“I don’t, uh,” Howie starts, because he almost jumps out of his skin at ‘Romeo,’ but then the rest of her words hit home. “Wait, what do you mean he’s not here?”

“He went off with a face like somebody took a piss in his tea,” she says. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing! I didn’t do anything!” Besides sucking on his face a little bit, last night. Howie thought _he_ was the one who was going to freak out about that, but maybe Arthur did? Feels unfair. Howie called dibs.

“You definitely look like a loser who did something, Jenkins,” Cora says. She’s leaning against her doorframe. 

“Thank you,” says Howie, “ _so much_ , for all your help; you’re just a treasure.”

“Hey,” Cora says, and he stops. Her eyebrows have lowered. “So I know you’re having some kind of gay panic here,” (what if Howie puked on her shoes? she would probably kill him; he should probably not puke), “but don’t take it out on Arthur, okay?”

“What?” Howie croaks, and his voice sounds terrible even inside his own head.

“He’s had a shitty couple of weeks,” Cora says. “Don’t be shitty to Arthur.”

Howie swallows the defensive initial urge to insist that he isn’t going to be shitty to Arthur, and he says, “What do you mean? I mean, he broke up with the douchey boyfriend,” he waves his hand vaguely at the rest of the hall, knowing that said douchey boyfriend lives here somewhere, “which, whatever, but. He’s okay, right?”

“Ask him yourself,” says Cora. “He’s probably in a practice room in Giarossi.”

Her helpfulness done for the day, she shuts her door in his face.

+

Giarossi is apparently the name of the performing arts center. It takes Howie a solid 20 minutes to find it — it turns out he hasn’t exactly been a patron of the arts while a student here; his mom would be so disappointed in him — and another 10 minutes to check out all the occupied practice rooms in the basement. The rooms are only mostly soundproofed; he can hear a squeaky saxophone from one, a trumpet from another, and what sounds like an entire jazz band in a third. There’s a tiny window in each door and he tries to peer through each one without getting caught creeping, which is only so-so in its effectiveness. He meets a couple of weirded-out stares before he finally, _finally_ looks through a window and sees Arthur.

He’s sitting at an upright piano, his back to the door. Howie can hear the faint strains of some classical music. Even through the door, he can tell that it’s complicated and that Arthur is playing through without a stumble. Yet another thing about him that Howie had no idea about.

Howie doesn’t know what Arthur will say. He doesn’t know what he even _wants_ Arthur to say. What if he left? Just leaving seems like a stellar option. Arthur doesn’t even know he’s here.

But there’s something vulnerable about the nape of his neck, bared to Howie. Suddenly all Howie can hear is Cora’s voice: Don’t be shitty to Arthur.

Howie reaches up and raps on the glass. Immediately, he resists the wild urge to duck below the window.

The music cuts off with a discordant jangle of keys. Arthur turns, and Howie sees him mouth a surprised, “Howie?”

Howie takes a deep breath and pushes the door open. “Hey,” he says. This was a terrible idea. He has the worst ideas. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” 

The practice room is honestly kind of a mess. It’s old and rundown, and in addition to the battle-scarred piano, there are broken music stands and chairs scattered throughout the claustrophobically small space. Only because he feels awkward looming with his hands shoved in his pockets while Arthur sits on the piano bench, Howie picks the least-broken-looking chair and sits down.

Arthur looks at him expectantly.

They both look at each other.

“How did you know I was here?” Arthur asks, finally, to Howie's eternal gratitude. He is a prince among men.

“Cora told me.”

His eyebrows draw together in consternation. “How did _Cora_ know I was here?”

“I hate to be the one to break it to you, but I think you guys are kind of friends.”

“Good god,” says Arthur faintly, and he sits there blinking.

“She said you were pissed off, when you left,” Howie says, because it’s easier than, ‘Hey man, my mouth has been on your mouth, isn’t that just the freaking weirdest?’

“Did she? She’s full of surprises.” There’s a brittle edge to Arthur’s voice that Howie hasn’t heard before, and he doesn’t think it’s directed at him _or_ at Cora.

Howie frowns. “Are you okay?”

“It’s fine,” says Arthur, waving him off, “really; I’m being dramatic.”

Arthur is probably the least dramatic person Howie has ever met in his life. “Yeah, you’re a regular primadonna,” says Howie. “A Godzilla of feelings, if you will.”

He huffs an amused breath. “You don’t have to get into this, Howie.”

Howie shrugs, and keeps watching him. “I know.”

Arthur lets out a long exhale, but he doesn’t put his hands back on the piano keyboard. “I spoke with my parents, earlier. I can tell they want me to take over the family business,” he says. “No one’s said it outright, but I know it’s partly why they were so insistent on me getting a degree in business.”

Howie’s never heard Arthur mention his family before. “What did you want to do?” he asks.

“I got into Berklee,” says Arthur, with a wry tilt to his mouth. That expression isn’t bitter, not quite, but it’s definitely approaching the idea of bitter. “They were unwilling to pay for it. The financial aid package was tied to my parents’ income, so I couldn’t afford the tuition myself.”

“Berklee’s … kind of a big deal.” Howie says it and instantly feels stupid, but Arthur doesn’t seem to mind.

He smiles faintly, again, without much mirth. His shoulders have hunched. Howie would do just about anything, it turns out, to ease those subtle signs of unhappiness. “My parents thought they were helping. They genuinely felt that a music degree wouldn’t set me up for success in life. I had hoped I could change their minds and I'd be able to transfer, but." Arthur's mouth twitches wryly. Howie gets it. Arthur's a second-semester junior — a transfer isn't exactly likely, at this point. 

“So instead, you’re gonna take over the family…”

“Arts and crafts store,” Arthur supplies.

“Crafts. Kraft. Oh, god,” says Howie, and Arthur snorts softly. “Do you _want_ to run the … craft store? I promise I’ll only judge, like, a tiny bit.”

“Not particularly,” says Arthur, honestly. Someone in the room next door is playing the clarinet very, very badly. It’s an epic fail. “I always thought my sister would do it, but it turns out her husband isn’t keen.”

Howie feels a surge of something, on Arthur’s behalf. Irritation? Indignation? “Why does the son-in-law get to be un-keen, and the actual son doesn’t?”

“He’s not Arthur Kraft Jr., for a start.” 

Howie tries not to let his mouth twitch at the thought of calling Arthur “Junior” for the rest of his livelong days, but Arthur pauses. 

“Do you need to get it out of your system?” Arthur asks.

“No,” Howie says, strangled, “nope, I’m good. Continue, good sir.”

There’s something surreal about it all — sitting in this crappy little music room, listening to Arthur quietly talk about his family with a background soundtrack of what seriously sounds like a third-grader who’s learning to play the clarinet.

“I suppose,” Arthur says slowly, “I don’t know what my relationship with my family will be like, if I dig my heels in and fight. They handled it, when I came out, but I can’t say they’ve been overjoyed to have a gay son. That wasn’t a choice that I could make. This is.”

It’s heavy stuff. Howie has never felt like he needed to be the perfect kid; not the way that Arthur clearly does. For one thing, Howie has a twin brother majoring in pre-med who’s cornered the market on the whole ‘perfect kid’ thing. For another, their parents would never have made him feel pressure like that (Dennis is a weirdo who pressured himself). His mom definitely doesn’t, now.

When it comes to the other thing… That’s harder. Not his mom. His mom would probably have a heart attack of joy if Howie brought a guy home. Not that bringing anyone home is something he's thinking about, at all. And not that it would be a guy. But his dad… Howie's dad can’t speak for himself anymore, being dead for four years now, but Howie just doesn’t know what he would have done if he knew about the Arthur of it all.

“Families, man,” Howie says. 

“Families,” Arthur agrees grimly. 

They’re both quiet. 

The clarinet squeaks in the room next door. 

“Oh hell no, I can’t take this shit anymore,” says Howie, and he gets up and joins Arthur on the piano bench. It takes Arthur a second to realize what he’s doing and scoot over to allow more space. They still have to sit close, thighs pressed together. The bench creaks but doesn’t collapse under them, which Howie will take as a win.

Arthur looks somewhat concerned.

“Arthur,” says Howie, seriously, as the hideous clarinetting continues, “I can’t listen to this much longer. Please, play something, before my ears start bleeding.”

“Hmm,” says Arthur, that thoughtful little hum that Howie is growing alarmingly fond of, and he plays the first few bars of the introduction to “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” His hands look strong and sure on the keyboard. Howie doesn’t know jack about making music — he played the tuba for all of a week in middle school band — but even he can recognize talent when he sees it.

“You’re a little late,” Howie says. “It’s January.”

“I take requests.”

“Nope,” says Howie, lifting his hands. “You’re the maestro.”

So Arthur plays. There’s this lightness in even the way he holds himself, when he’s sat at the piano. He starts with a couple snatches of Christmas carols, just to wind Howie up (“real nice,” says Howie), but then he plays “House of the Rising Sun” and a couple of other classics that prove he isn’t fully illiterate when it comes to pop culture (just mostly), before finishing with the melancholy piece that Howie heard him practicing from outside. It’s got an old-school sound. 

There’s no music in front of him, but Arthur’s hands slide up and down the keyboard with confidence. Howie must be in the way, leaning against his shoulder the way he is, but Arthur doesn’t complain.

“What was that?” Howie asks, when the last chord rings. “Beethoven? Mozart?” He’s kidding (mostly).

Arthur laughs, but not like he’s laughing at Howie. He has a way of doing that. It’s nice. “Gershwin,” he says. “ _An American in Paris_. ‘Prelude No. 2 in C Sharp Minor.’ Simple, but a classic.”

“ _Simple_?” says Howie.

“Compared to Liszt or Rachmaninoff,” Arthur says, like Howie has any idea who those composers are.

“Gesundheit.”

Arthur shuts his eyes and looks deeply pained.

+

Howie convinces Arthur to play some more. It’s not hard; he clearly loves music and delights in sharing it. He doesn’t even laugh all that hard when Howie tries and fails to show off the four or five bars of “Chopsticks” that he remembers.

It seemed so important, when Howie went to find Arthur, to hash everything out and figure out what in the hell is happening to him. It seems less important, now. Howie’s having a good time — that’s what college is supposed to be about, right? That’s the part that matters. Who needs labels, and especially ones that would be totally inaccurate since Howie is _definitely not gay_?

But still, Howie feels the bottom drop out of his stomach when they’re locking up the practice room and Arthur says, “So … about this,” with a gesture between himself and Howie.

“What about us? Not that there’s an us; just — the collective you and me.”

Arthur pulls a beanie on over his hair. “It’s for the best if we’re discreet.”

Howie feels … complicated feelings.

“I’m technically not supposed to be involved with my residents,” Arthur continues.

“Your douchey ex is your resident,” says Howie, definitely very matter-of-factly and not at all snide, as he zips up his coat.

Arthur gives him a sidelong look; for ‘douchey ex,’ Howie suspects. “We requested and received permission from ResLife,” explains Arthur. “Normally, the administration frowns on RAs having authority over, er. Well. Relationships are strongly discouraged.”

‘Relationships,’ ‘involved,’ and ‘er.’ Three great tastes that taste great together. 

“Yeah,” says Howie. “I mean, that’s cool. That’s fine. That’s great.” It’s perfect, considering that Howie needs no one ever to know that he’s ‘involved’ (thanks, Arthur) with a dude. He should be singing in the streets.

Arthur is giving him another funny look. “It’s only until the end of the month, when the house director hires the new permanent RA.” 

Does that mean Arthur still thinks they’ll still be … doing whatever, after Jan term ends? Does Arthur feel like he needs to reassure Howie? He doesn’t need to reassure Howie. Howie’s chill as a polar bear.

“It’s cool, yo,” says Howie. “We’re good.” He is even making casual use of ‘yo.’ Everything is fine.

“Right.” Arthur reaches for the doorknob, but then he stops and reaches for Howie instead, and yeah, okay, Howie is still really down for the kissing. Arthur is good at the kissing. 

They only stop making out when (a) Howie’s back has been pressed up against the wall for a while, and (b) somebody pounds on the door. 

“Hey!” somebody complains, muffled. Howie quickly looks over at the door, but the angle is such that whoever’s out there couldn’t possibly see them through the small window. “My reservation started at 5:30; your time is up, dude!”

“Just a moment!” Arthur calls, and he steps back, his hands falling away from Howie.

Howie fights the overwhelming urge to pull him back in again. “Let me guess,” he says. “Discretion, not your strong suit?”

“Er, no, I would say that it’s a personal strength, ordinarily,” says Arthur. He’s clearly flustered as he tries to straighten out his coat, which Howie takes as a compliment.

At least Howie’s not the only one losing his shit a little.

* * *

Arthur really and truly is a discreet person. He lives his life the way he sees fit, but he has never made a habit of excessive PDA, particularly given the political leanings of his hometown and his own family. He is the very soul of discretion.

Except when it comes to Howie Jenkins, apparently.

The list of secluded places in which Arthur has made out with Howie over the last week includes:

  * Two practice rooms in the performing arts center
  * The birdwatching aisle at the library
  * The stairwell that leads to the roof of Mahoney Hall, while Arthur was on duty for the evening and waiting to see if any students needed him (they didn’t)
  * The supply closet in the Harrison Hall front office, while Arthur was dutifully maintaining his office hours that no one ever comes to
  * The smoking gazebo on the residential quad (at night, in the pouring rain)



They don’t only kiss; they talk, endlessly, about everything and nothing. Arthur doesn’t think he’s ever talked so much in his life.

“You seem happy, lately,” says Kristy at breakfast one day, obviously fishing. “Are you getting back together with Patrick?”

“What? No,” says Arthur. “Definitely not.”

“Oh?” she asks innocently. “That’s good! I think you can definitely find someone better. Someone who’s cute and funny and—”

“Kristybee…” says Cliff, Kristy’s boyfriend, who’s been sitting beside her and sharing her waffles. Clearly, they’ve discussed this. Discussed Arthur, and Howie.

“Right, right,” she says. “Well, I’m just glad you’re feeling better!”

“Thank you,” Arthur says dubiously, eyeballing his cousin, and then Kristy’s entire face lights up. 

“Oh, look, it’s Howie! _Howie!_ ” She lifts a hand to wave and she’s practically wiggling in her seat; she can hardly contain herself.

Arthur turns and it is, indeed, Howie, making his way across the dining hall with those two friends of his. Though he’s heard all about them (and Howie’s existential crises over the possibility of them dating) at this point, Arthur has never met Howie’s friends. He gets the distinct impression that he’s a dirty little secret. It’s a necessity for the time being, to avoid the question of Arthur losing his job, but he can already tell that it’s potentially going to be a problem, later. He has every sympathy for Howie's position, but coming out of the closet in high school was difficult. Arthur has no intention of going back in.

But that’s later. For now, Howie’s eyes widen and he glances between Kristy and his friends. He says something to the two of them, and they walk on to find a table without him as Howie crosses to speak to Kristy, Arthur, and Cliff. He doesn’t see it, but the girl he left behind, who must be his best friend Amber, watches him the entire way.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t my favorite RA,” Howie greets cheerfully, looking at Kristy.

She laughs. “Isn’t that Arthur?”

“Ehh,” says Howie. “I guess he’s okay.”

Arthur lets himself smirk, a bit. “High praise from a party-thrower.”

“God, you are still _so salty_ about that—” Howie starts, and then he realizes that both Kristy and Cliff are watching them, and he stops.

“Howie, this is my boyfriend, Reddy!” Kristy says, generously rescuing him, and she beams and tucks her arm into Cliff’s.

“Hey. You can just call me Cliff,” Cliff is saying, and then Cora Caldwell sweeps in like a hurricane.

“What is _this_ cozy chat.” Cora sets her tray down with great gusto beside Arthur’s. “Are we your chaperones? Let’s Regency-era this shit!”

Of all people, Cora caught on very quickly that Arthur and Howie are never in Arthur’s room alone with the door closed.

That’s what he suspects her arch looks and smart remarks have meant, anyway.

Arthur gives Howie a sidelong look, expecting stammering and denials, but instead, Howie looks weary. “Remind me never to introduce you to my mom,” he says. “For so many reasons.”

“Parents love me,” says Cora, who is wearing a “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” T-shirt and at least three extra facial piercings today.

“Howie, you should eat with us! There’s plenty of space; bring your friends!”

Arthur can see the panic in Howie’s eyes, for a split second. “Sorry, no can do, KQ. There’s top secret business afoot.”

“Top secret,” Cora says, so very dubious. “Uh huh.”

“National security waits for no man!” Howie turns tail and flees to his friends on the other side of the dining room with impressive speed.

“So,” says Cora, “Kraft.”

“Caldwell,” Arthur says evenly.

Kristy looks between the two of them like she’s watching a tennis match. Cliff keeps eating waffles.

“My friends are looking for a pianist for their band. You in?”

At first, he thinks she’s messing with him, but then her face doesn’t change. “Thank you, but I suspect it’s unlikely that we’ll be musically compatible.”

“I wouldn’t set you up as the keyboardist for a thrash metal outfit,” she says scornfully. “It’s a jazz band. They need a piano player.”

“—Oh,” says Arthur, stopping short. 

When Arthur first matriculated as a freshman, he had still thought he could talk his parents around to the Berklee transfer. He hadn’t expected to be on campus long enough to justify joining bands or even informal practice groups.

Three years is long enough, probably.

“I’d welcome a conversation with them,” he says, and Kristy claps.

Arthur has spent the last few years planning for a distant, misty day when his life will be what he pictured. Perhaps it’s time to appreciate what he has.

* * *

Arthur is laughing. Full-on, almost-loud _laughing_ , in the library.

Howie has never been so proud.

“You did not,” Arthur says. “I don’t believe you.”

“I did. I really did.”

They’re facing each other on the sofa, legs drawn up and knees nearly touching. It’s late and Arthur is clearly fading, his head resting on the back of the couch. He finished studying for his quiz ages ago, and has just been keeping Howie company — unproductive, sleepy, attractive company — for hours. He has sank down lower as he’s grown more tired, while Howie sits with his elbow resting on the back of the sofa and his head propped up in his hand. Now, for once, Howie is the taller of the pair of them. 

Arthur is still laughing.

Howie likes this dude so much.

“Why in the world would you do that to your brother?”

“ _I_ don’t know!” says Howie. “We were eight; it seemed like a good idea at the time!”

“My sister and I have had our moments, over the years, but at least I’ve never hidden her guinea pig, placed a stuffed animal in the cage, and convinced her the guinea pig had been put under a dreadful curse.”

“Dennis deserved it,” says Howie ruthlessly. “Don’t feel too bad for him.”

“My sympathies,” Arthur says, “don’t lie with your brother.”

That’s a good Arthur-look, right there. One of Howie’s favorites. “Yeah?” Howie leans in. “Would you say they lie with the smarter, handsomer—”

“That's not a word,” says Arthur. Howie ignores him, because he’s a filthy prescriptivist.

“—more charming Jenkins brother?” He waggles his eyebrows to underscore the joke of it all.

But Arthur, as usual, doesn’t do what Howie expects. “I would,” he says, looking up at Howie warmly. 

Howie reaches for him. He cups Arthur's face in his hand, thumb brushing along the top of his cheek. Arthur doesn’t so much as blink, watching him calmly, though Howie can feel the start of a faint smile beginning under his thumb.

“You’re just lovely,” Howie says, ostensibly sarcastically but really … kind of not. “You know that, right?”

“So I’ve been told,” Arthur teases, and he’s smiling when Howie kisses him.

+

The beginning of the end starts with Amber.

Howie meets her for coffee for what feels like the first time in years, though it really can’t have been more than four or five days. That’s an eternity in Amber-and-Howie time, though he’s run into her in the hall or had a meal with her and Mitch, here and there.

Howie feels a little guilty.

She’s quiet. They’re _both_ quiet, sitting across from each other at the tiny Terrace Cafe table, which is how he knows something really isn’t right.

“So I figured we’d leave tomorrow afternoon, after my office hours,” Amber says, finally. She’s toying with her mocha’s straw with the tip of her thumb. “My mom says you should come for dinner.” The Clarks and Howie's mom are still laboring under the hilarious delusion that one day, Howie and Amber are going to wake up and realize they're perfect for each other. Never gonna happen, but they live in hope.

“Oh,” says Howie. “Actually, I think I’m gonna stay here this weekend.”

Amber’s head rises sharply. “What?”

“Yeah, Arthur joined this new band and he’s only been with them for, like, two days. They’ve got a gig on Saturday and it’s either gonna be great or the most hilarious trainwreck ever, so — yeah.”

“You’re buddy-buddy with the RA, these days,” says Amber.

Howie wants to rant about Arthur’s horribleness until the cows come home, to deflect suspicion, but he thinks of Arthur’s sleepy, trusting face in the library the other night, and he hears Cora again. _Don’t be shitty to Arthur._

He hears Cora a lot, these days.

“I guess he’s not so bad,” says Howie. “I mean, I like him.”

Amber doesn’t hear the raw truth in that, apparently. “Well. _You’ve_ changed your tune.”

“What can I say,” says Howie, mouth running on autopilot, and then it deserts him. Absence makes the heart grow fonder? The heart wants what it wants? His brain throws all kinds of unrepeatable stuff and nonsense at him, as he grasps for an appropriately ludicrous cliche. “Uh, teamwork makes the dream work.”

Amber looks down her nose at him. “That,” she says disdainfully, “is awful.”

“I know.” Howie is honestly impressed with himself. “I don’t know where it came from, but I hope there’s an Etsy shop selling embroidered pillows.”

Amber pulls out her phone, taps for a few seconds, then says, “Yep.” 

“Score.”

“You’re diabolically good at ‘But Is It on Etsy?’ ”

“I try,” says Howie modestly.

“Look, fine,” says Amber, stuffing her phone back into her coat pocket. “I’ll drive home by myself this weekend, but you _are_ coming to the midnight movie tonight, right?”

Oh.

Shit. 

Cora’s theater troupe is giving a performance tonight: original-flavor _Star Wars_ , turned into a short play starring a genderswapped cast. Kristy’s buying flowers that everyone is going to pitch in for. Howie’s face must give the game away.

Well. Amber clearly realizes about the double-booking, at least. Probably not the part about chucking a bouquet at Cora while she’s dressed like Chewbacca. That's a little esoteric.

“What is happening with you?” Amber demands, and Howie thinks it’s not a joke.

“Wookiees,” he says weakly. 

“ _What?_ ”

He promised Amber _weeks_ ago that he’d go with her to see _The Princess Bride_ at the local indie movie theater, the one in the basement of a weird storefront in town.

“I told Cora I’d go to this thing she’s doing tonight, but I’m sorry, I forgot we’re going to the movie, so I’ll just cancel —”

“You know what? It’s fine.”

“It doesn’t … _sound_ fine,” Howie says warily.

“It is, really,” says Amber. She looks tired. “Go to your thing with Cora. One of the girls from my Victorian literature class will come with me.”

“Amber,” he starts.

“It’s okay, really, it is.” She pushes her chair back and picks up her backpack. “I’ll see you later, okay?”

In her wake, Howie thinks that he probably could have handled that one better.

+

“Dude,” Mitch says reproachfully, when Howie stops by their room to pick up his student ID.

“Did Amber sic you on me?” he says, tearing apart his bed. “I’m sorry! I really am!”

“Not cool, man.”

“I know, I’m the worst. _Ha!_ ” The ID has turned up, tucked into his pillowcase. Howie has no frigging idea how it got in there.

“Just so you know, I’m gonna go with Ambie, so she won’t be alone,” says Mitch. 

“—You’re what,” says Howie, and then Arthur leans in the open door, from where he's been waiting in the hall. 

Howie ignores Arthur. "You're not a girl from Amber's Victorian literature class. You're Mitch."

"Howie," Arthur says.

Howie is feeling so many conflicting things: wanting to get Arthur out of here as soon as possible. Wanting to keep his two best friends from going on what certainly sounds like will be a dately-shaped excursion. His life is hard and complicated.

“I know, I know! Late!” he says to Arthur, and then he turns to his unimpressed roommate. “Mitch, I know, buddy; I’m gonna make it up to her, I swear.”

“She’s sad,” Mitch says, like it’s the worst thing he can imagine, which is … it really is the worst. Howie is a terrible person.

“I swear!” he promises over his shoulder, as he bolts.

+

Howie enjoys the hell out of Cora’s troupe’s performance, right up until Han Solo and Chewbacca make their grand entrance in the Mos Eisley cantina and he realizes exactly who Cora has been complaining stole the Han Solo part out from under her.

Howie’s sitting between Arthur and Kristy and, in the dark, has had his hand on Arthur’s knee for a while. At first, it was to placate Arthur when he was politely muttering about having absolutely no idea what was going on — he’s never seen _Star Wars_ ; what kind of a childhood did he _have_ — but then Howie just left it because it was nice.

And then Heather Grimsby saunters onstage in a white shirt and black vest, and Howie’s hands turn into claws.

Arthur stifles a yelp. Howie hurriedly loosens his grip and yanks his hand back into his own lap. He shuts his eyes for a moment, scrubbing his hands over his face. Arthur lightly touches his arm. Howie has no doubt that if he looked over, he’d find Arthur watching him with concern.

When he opens his eyes again, Heather is still onstage, sitting slouched with her legs open wide as she brags about the Millennium Falcon’s speed on the Kessel Run. Cora’s still there too, wearing a very furry brown hoodie and speaking in fierce howls that bring the house down every time.

It’s surreal.

Howie doesn’t look at Arthur. He looks at Heather, and he remembers what she said last year, hovering over him in the dark, her hair surrounding them like a macabre curtain.

 _“Wait, oh my god… Are you_ gay _?”_

He wasn’t gay, he’d thought. He’d just been drunk, and he hadn’t been into it, and that had been normal.

Hadn’t been able to get any of that out of his mouth, though.

Howie watches the rest of the show in a daze. It’s kind of fascinating, really. He somehow doubts that the director really intended to display so much smoldering sexual tension between Han and Chewie. That would have made _Star Wars_ a very different kind of movie.

There is smoldering sexual tension between _Cora and Heather Grimsby_.

It’s definitely surreal.

When the lights come up, Kristy is exclaiming to Cliff on her other side. While she’s busy, Arthur leans in and asks, “Are you all right?”

“Just … peachy,” says Howie. “Can we congratulate our resident thespian and get the hell out of here?”

+

Arthur shuts Howie’s bedroom door behind them. He glances toward Mitch’s unmade bed, and the entire unwashed state of filth that is Mitch’s side of the room in general, but Howie shakes his head.

“He went to the midnight movie in town; he won’t be back for hours.” For want of something to do with his nervous energy, he’s pacing.

“Howie?” Arthur prompts. He’s still wearing his hat and peacoat, standing beside Howie’s desk. He’s clearly worried.

“I’ve never,” Howie says. It’s hard to get a good pace on, in this room; Mitch’s side of the room places severe constraints on walkable space. “I never, uh. Guys. That’s not me. Hasn’t been me. Before.”

“I figured as much,” Arthur says. It’s reassuring how matter of fact he is.

“You could tell?”

“Whenever we started to get close, at first, you had this face.”

“Shovel face,” Howie says, resigned.

Arthur’s expression is baffled. “Shovel … what?”

“Cora,” he says gravely, as if it explains everything, because … it definitely does.

Arthur reaches up and takes off his hat. His hair is wild with static electricity, and Howie wants to go over and try to flatten it even though he knows it’ll only end in a shock for the both of them. Still watching Howie, Arthur sits down on the edge of Howie’s desk.

“There was this girl, last year,” Howie says. “At a frat party during orientation week. _Heather Grimsby_. We were totally gonna go to bonetown—” He can _see_ Arthur temper his instinctive reaction to ‘bonetown.’ He’s a prince. “—except I couldn’t get into it, no matter how hard I tried, and she asked me, uh. She asked if I was gay.”

Howie keeps pacing. It’s easier than looking at Arthur. “I had all these reasons, right? All these excuses for why it didn’t work out with her, because I couldn’t be gay. But in the end, I think — I think maybe I’m just pretty frigging gay.”

Arthur isn’t saying anything.

Also, Howie realizes, he left out an important context clue.

“Heather Grimsby was Han Solo,” he adds.

Howie’s desk creaks. “I figured,” says Arthur. His voice is closer. His hand touches Howie’s elbow, and then Howie lets himself sink into Arthur’s arms. He’s warm and he smells nice, and he rubs Howie’s back and presses his jaw against the side of Howie's face. Howie could stand here for the rest of his life, probably, wrapped up in Arthur.

That's an untenable goal, though, so instead, they curl up in Howie’s bed and Howie makes Arthur watch _Star Wars_. Arthur hasn’t spent any time in this room, due to total paranoia, and there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing him wrapped in Howie’s blankets and squinting at Howie’s laptop.

Arthur watches with avid interest, if adorable confusion. Howie loves the _Star Wars_ , don’t get him wrong, but he finds himself watching Arthur at least as much as he watches the movie.

“What?” says Arthur, squinting harder. They’ve turned out the lights, and colors from the screen are washing across his face. “What _is_ a Sand Person?”

“Look at you,” Howie says fondly. He kisses Arthur’s head. “Learning all the lingo.”

“Jedi, Force, Sand People,” he recites. “That’s the sum total of what I’ve learned.”

“Ooh, talk dirty to me,” Howie murmurs, and Arthur turns his head and laughs against Howie’s throat. His mouth is hot and his breath flickers across Howie’s skin.

Howie just feels good. He always feels good with Arthur. He runs his fingers through Arthur’s hair and then uses a light grip to gently tug his head up. Arthur goes along with the suggestion, and he doesn’t look particularly surprised, in the moment before Howie kisses him.

He _does_ , though, break away to ask, “Does this do it for you?”

“What? No!” Howie defends, rolling over so he can shove his face into his pillow and laugh, and Arthur follows him ruthlessly, his weight warm against Howie’s back. 

“Darth Vader, robots…” He pauses, then hazards, “Captain Kirk?”

“That’s _Star Trek_!” Howie complains, laughing harder.

Arthur is laughing, too, and pressing a couple of kisses to the back of his neck. “They aren’t the same thing?”

“Now you’re just messing with me,” says Howie, turning over again. Arthur is looking very pleased with himself, leaning over Howie. 

“Yes,” says Arthur. “I figured out that there was a difference two years ago.”

“ _Two years ago—_ ” 

Howie laughs into Arthur’s mouth for at least 20 seconds straight.

+

“Wait, wait wait,” says Howie, eventually, once they've been making out long enough that they've given up all pretense of watching the movie, and Arthur immediately leans back. “Hold that thought.” Howie pecks him on the mouth, and then wiggles out of the bed. It’s but the work of a moment to find a sock amid the piles on Mitch’s side of the floor. Hopefully it’s not too filthy, because Howie’s got much more important things to do than find a clean one. He goes to the door, opens it long enough to stick the sock on the outside doorknob, and then he closes it again and locks it for good measure.

Howie has never had the opportunity to avail himself of the sock, but Mitch sexiled him a couple times freshman year. It’s actually been a long time since Howie got kicked out of his own room for one of Mitch’s jolly lasses.

But Howie seriously does not want to be thinking about Mitch having sex right now.

Arthur looks like he was made to be in Howie’s bed. He’s deliciously rumpled and watching Howie, propped up on his elbows. “I didn’t think anyone actually put a sock on the doorknob in real life.”

“Hey, my gentleman, my scholar, don’t knock the classics,” Howie says, and he scrambles back to bed. Arthur opens his arms and pulls him in, all the way on top of him. It’s a jolt of pure electric _want_ , feeling Arthur hard against him and hearing Arthur’s breath catch.

“Oh, man, this is gonna be over so fast,” Howie groans, and Arthur smothers a startled laugh against his cheek. “You can never tell anyone; you can never tell _Cora_.”

“My lips are sealed,” Arthur promises, nosing at his jaw.

“I mean, maybe don’t _seal_ them,” says Howie, and then he pushes his dick down against Arthur's thigh and groans again.

“Howie,” Arthur says, and Howie opens his blissed-out eyes to find Arthur looking up at him. He cups Howie’s face in his hand, and then gently thumbs Howie’s eyebrow. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” says Howie, suddenly breathless with the way that Arthur is looking at him. All at once, it's a struggle to remember how to form coherent sentences. He's a mess of feelings too big for words, somehow heavy in the pit of his stomach and light as air at the same time. His heart is beating so loud Arthur has to be able to hear it. Hell, Arthur can probably _feel_ Howie's pulse throbbing against his thigh. But Howie's extremely freaking sure of one thing: "We should definitely do this."

"If you say 'bonetown,' I'm going to leave," Arthur threatens, but the skin at the corners of his eyes is crinkling with his smile.

+

There’s a soft clicking sound that registers, somewhere in a deeply-uninterested corner of Howie’s brain, as familiar. Howie ignores it; Howie is kissing Arthur and currently ignoring everything that is not how good he feels. 

Then the door swings open and the lights go on.

Howie freezes. 

He immediately, instinctively takes stock of what’s happening. It’s like that moment when you friend someone on Facebook and then you go back and look at your own profile with fresh eyes to see what horrors they’ll be judging you for. 

Only instead of scrolling through some spectacularly embarrassing childhood photos that Dennis tagged him in, Howie is in bed under a tall, green-eyed dude with big hands and inhumanly long eyelashes; Howie's tongue is in Arthur’s mouth and he’s gripping at the nape of Arthur’s neck and has his other hand up the back of his shirt.

It’s hard to say what happens first — Arthur making a noise that would be hilarious in any other context and rolling off him, or Howie flailing and pushing him over. Howie’s hand gets stuck in Arthur’s shirt, for a second, and they’re tangled in the comforter. It’s all as awkward as humanly possible.

Mitch is standing in the open door. He looks like his jaw is going to physically hit the floor. His eyes are huge.

Howie scrambles up in bed. “Arthur was — just — looking for his contact. We were looking for Arthur’s contact.” Shit. “No,” he says, and he squares his shoulders. “We were making out. And — stuff.”

“Is _that_ why there was a sock on the floor?” Mitch asks, clearly still in shock.

“You mean on the door.”

“No,” Mitch says, brandishing said sock, “it was on the floor.”

Damn that traitor sock.

"Well," says Howie. “Shit.” 

The three of them stare at each other.

On the bright side, Howie has never been so glad to be wearing all his clothes in his entire life.

There's not a whole lot of real estate in an extra long twin bed, so Howie is practically sitting in Arthur's lap. "Maybe," says Arthur helplessly, "the two of you would like to talk? And I'll just—" He shifts, clearly in preparation for sliding out of bed, and Howie grabs his leg in a death grip.

If Arthur doesn't go, or if he somehow miraculously whisks Howie away with him, Howie won't have to have this conversation, which is seeming like a great idea right now.

Arthur turns to him. With his back to Mitch, he somehow manages to raise his eyebrows in a way that comes across both questioning and concerned.

He would stay, is the thing. He'd sit and hold Howie's hand through the entire excruciating conversation, even though it would be all the more awkward to have Arthur, who Mitch doesn't even really know, there for it.

Howie can't do that to Arthur (or Mitch, for that matter). He's got to take one for the team. He lets go of him. "I'll just, uh, see you later; yep, I will ... do that." He doesn’t call Arthur ‘buddy’ or ‘chief,’ which feels like a victory.

“Call me,” says Arthur, and, in lieu of a goodbye kiss, he claps Howie’s knee in the gesture equivalent of ‘go get ‘em, tiger.’ Not that that’s a thing that Arthur would ever say. But Howie can feel it in spirit.

Arthur is a disheveled mess, when he steps out of Howie's bed. His hair is a wreck and his clothes are wrinkled as hell. Howie studiously does not check him out below the belt. But, with great dignity, Arthur steps into his shoes and gathers his coat, scarf, and hat. 

Mitch is, if it's possible, staring even harder now. Arthur has to clear his throat and say, "Excuse me" before Mitch even realizes he's blocking the door. 

Mitch steps to the side and, with one last encouraging glance back at Howie, Arthur leaves them to their fate. The door closes behind him with a soft click.

" _Dude._ " 

"I thought you were going to the movies," Howie croaks, comforter piled in his lap.

"We got dinner instead," Mitch says, dazed. Howie's heart is thundering so hard that he can't even bring himself to freak out about Mitch and Amber maybe going on a dinner date. His brain can only handle one panic at a time. "Howie. Dude. Was that the _RA_?"

"Uh, yeah," says Howie. "He's not supposed to date residents, though, he could lose his job, so maybe don't ... tell anyone."

"Whoa. Are you _dating_ him?"

"I think kind of??" says Howie. "We haven't talked about it, exactly; it’s been more — piano and kissing, but. Uh. Probably. Yeah."

This is well beyond the pale when it comes to Howie’s relationship with Mitch. They have particular bailiwicks that work for them: possibly-suspect food, pop culture that involves many explosions, _Xena_. They don’t _do_ stuff like this.

Mitch looks like he’s at a loss, too. He finally says, "Are you, like ... gay?"

Three (okay, four, but 'like' doesn't count) simple words. The last time someone asked them, Howie left his favorite T-shirt in a stranger's room and then spent an entire year avoiding her like the plague.

"See, it's like — it’s like Xena and Gabrielle, except with, uh, boy parts." Howie regrets that conversational tack as soon as he's taken it. It muddies the waters extremely unnecessarily, and also both Arthur and Cora would probably start yelling at him about gender essentialism or something. "Uh." He’s pretty sure he's having a stroke. If he could just stroke right out of this entire conversation, that would be great.

"What?" says Mitch blankly.

It's possible that Howie is making this complicated in a way that it doesn't have to be. He's going to break Mitch's brain, if he's not careful. That would be a tremendous loss for the human race and also science. Mitch's particular brand of genius should be preserved at all costs.

Howie still hasn't said anything. Shit.

"I'm gay," he says. "And I'm dating Arthur."

The world doesn't end. 

"Okay," says Mitch. "That's — wow. I mean, I'm surprised. But that's cool." He finally puts his keys down on his desk. "Does Amber know?"

"No," says Howie. "How mad is she? Scale of one to nuclear winter?"

"She's pretty mad," Mitch says hesitantly. So: nuclear winter, then. "You should probably tell her."

"Great," Howie says into his hands. 

Things are kind of quiet, as they get ready for bed. Whether it's because Mitch walked in on Howie about to get off with a dude or because Mitch is judging Howie for ditching Amber, it's hard to say, really.

Howie gets into bed with his phone, which he uses to text Arthur threats of transferring schools and moving out of the country to live under an assumed name.

 _Is it really going that badly?_ Arthur asks, right when Mitch says, "Howie?" out of the darkness.

Howie looks up from the soft glow of his phone and glances across the space between their beds. "Yeah?"

"Sorry I interrupted you guys going to bonetown."

Ha! It _is_ a common phrase! Suck on that, Arthur's judgy face!

"That's okay, bud," says Howie. "Bonetown is a state of mind, not a place."

Mitch laughs. "That’s deep.”

“That’s me,” says Howie. “Late-night sex philosopher extraordinaire.”

“Hey,” Mitch says again. “Hey Howie. Hey.”

“Yeah, Mitchy Mitch?”

“Chris Pratt or Chris Hemsworth?”

“Like … do-able-ness? Do-ability?”

“Yeah!”

Howie considers it. “Chris Evans. Definitely the most superior of the Chrises.”

“Huh,” says Mitch, sounding thoughtful. There is a moment of silence. Then he asks: “Young Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones or young Harrison Ford as Han Solo?”

“Mitch,” Howie says, with feeling, “I love you, buddy — not like that — but that is just _fucking evil_.”

+

Mitch knowing, it turns out, isn’t so bad.

He has so many weird questions, because apparently he’s never had an openly gay friend in his entire life, and he has absolutely no compunction about asking them. Howie spends the next morning answering a steady stream of absolute hilarity.

The down side of Mitch knowing is that Mitch is epically bad with secrets.

He can keep them; that’s not the problem. But it tears him up on the inside, because he's got a heart of gold. Or of marshmallow, really. He’s not even great with secret Santa stuff. And keeping a secret this big, from _Amber_?

Howie has to tell her. Preferably before his roommate expires from guilt.

Amber doesn’t return any of his texts, or even the voicemail that he leaves (who even leaves _voicemails_? if that doesn't communicate how sorry Howie is, nothing will). Howie doesn’t want to drag Mitch any farther into this than he’s already been dragged, so he leaves him out. Desperate times call for desperate measures: he picks up two coffees and then sits on the low retaining wall outside the library’s front entrance for 20 minutes, regretting his winter clothing choices and waiting in the cold.

At 12:05 on the dot, Amber steps out the front door, smiling and waving to several girls who are coming out with her. She’s the TA for a Jan-term class on feminist fiction. It’s a measure of how great a TA she is that people actually turn up for office hours on a Saturday morning. She pauses for a second when she sees Howie.

He lifts a cold, cold hand, and uses her mocha to awkwardly wave at her.

She walks over. That's a start.

“You’re such a stalker,” Amber says, but she accepts his offering of caffeine and sugar.

“I’m sorry about last night,” he says, and then he’s struck by a thought. “I wonder how many conversations on campus this morning started with that.” Even by Saturday-morning-in-January standards, the campus is unusually deserted this morning. For a while last night, Howie received a string of increasingly murderous (hilarious) texts from Arthur regarding a party over in Harrison that he was in the process of breaking up. It must be hangover city today. 

“A great many,” Amber predicts, and she hops up to sit beside him. “Look at your life, look at your choices, student body.”

“Yeah,” says Howie.

“Yep,” Amber echoes, and she takes a sip of her coffee. They’re both looking at the tall, sweeping columns surrounding the library’s front doors, not at each other.

Just say it, Howie thinks. Just do it. Rip off that big old bandaid.

“I’m dating Arthur,” Howie says, and then his face does something ridiculous, probably, in his shock that the words actually made it out into the world.

Amber turns to look at him so fast that she almost hits him in the face with her ponytail. “You — what?”

“I’m with Arthur. The RA. Like … _with_ Arthur the RA, if you know what I mean. Bow chicka bow wow.” Not … the greatest, but at least the phrase ‘the beast with two backs’ didn’t come out of his mouth. The Shakespearean language class that he took last semester still haunts him to this day.

Amber’s face has darkened. “That’s not funny.”

“You’ll note I’m not laughing.”

Howie is shaking in his frigging boots. He’s jiggling his leg; he can’t stop it. He’s probably just going to jiggle it until it falls off. That’s definitely a thing. 

Amber must see it in his face, because, finally, her eyes go wide. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” 

“ _Really_?”

“Really really.”

Amber’s mouth opens and closes, and then opens again, but not in a ‘I’m gonna put you out of your misery and say something’ way. It’s a ‘what the actual fuck’ expression.

When Howie’s nervous, he talks. (When Howie’s angry, he talks; when Howie’s scared, he talks; when Howie’s happy, oh boy does he talk. He’s nothing if not self aware.) Words start pouring out of him. “I know everything has been so freakin’ weird, with you and me, and I’m really sorry; I wasn’t ready to tell people or whatever, and I was trying to keep everybody separate and it wasn’t … the smoothest.” 

“That’s one way to put it,” says Amber, clearly on autopilot. “I… wow. Howie.”

“I’m a little bit really very gay,” says Howie. “It turns out.”

“Like … gay for Arthur?” she asks, carefully, her brow furrowed in the daintiest little frown.

“Gay in general,” he says. “The full gay, if you will. But also so frigging gay for Arthur, holy crap.”

“Oh my god,” Amber says, and then, suddenly, she laughs. Howie has no idea why she’s laughing, but there’s such genuine mirth in her face. “Our parents are going to be _so disappointed._ ”

Howie cracks up. “The death of Howie and Amber Jenkins,” he says.

“Clark-Jenkins,” she corrects tartly.

“No, we would totally portmanteau that shit. Amber and Howie Jerk: the beautiful love that was never meant to be.”

They’re both still laughing, and Howie just… He just really loves her. Not like that; never like that. Their parents were always wrong. He’s not the Jenkins brother for whom Amber has carried a lifelong, doomed torch. He and Amber have always loved each other like brother and sister. Probably more than Howie loves his actual brother (sorry, Dennis). 

But this definitely puts a very final stamp on the thing.

“ ‘Jerk,’ ” Amber repeats judgmentally, shaking her head. “You’re such an idiot.” She leans forward and puts her arms around him, and Howie hugs her back, trying to will his stupid hands to stop shaking with relief. “Obviously it would be Clankins,” Amber says into his jacket collar, and she squeezes him.

* * *

Howie has been scowling at a piece of paper for five minutes by the time Arthur finally says, “And in closing, I’m going to run away to a desert island in the Maldives with Anderson Cooper.”

“Uh huh,” says Howie distantly, stabbing at the paper with his pen. “Great plan. Ten points to Gryffindor.”

Given Howie’s lack of reaction despite his unseemly feelings on Anderson Cooper — he had too much coffee one night last week and went on a rant that involved borderline-obsessive use of the phrase ‘silver fox’ — he is absolutely not listening to a word Arthur says. He isn’t paying any attention to his dinner tray either, though, so Arthur isn’t taking it as a personal slight.

“We’ll drink mai tais, most likely, and make love all night long,” Arthur muses. There’s another dining hall table just behind theirs, packed in closely, and from the way that one of the girls has started laughing, he’s fairly certain he’s been heard. At least someone is listening, even if it isn’t Howie.

Howie blinks, hard, and then looks up. Arthur can actually track the moment, in his expression, when he goes back and thinks about what Arthur has been saying. “What kind of desert island has mai tais?” he asks.

He shrugs, easily. “This one.”

“Would you really leave me behind without even the _offer_ of meeting Anderson? Way harsh, Tai.”

Arthur furrows his eyebrows at him.

“You don’t — really? Arthur, buddy, we have got to work on your pop culture.”

“So I’ve been told.” 

It only takes two more bites of Arthur’s sandwich for Howie to throw his pen down and demand, “Paper forms! Who even still requires _paper forms_?”

“The Office of Student Affairs, for one,” says Arthur pragmatically, setting his meal aside. “What’s it for?”

He sighs. “I have to declare a major by April.”

“Might I recommend not-business?” says Arthur dryly, and Howie sighs again.

“Really helpful,” he says. “I’ll keep that one in mind, thanks.”

“You have no idea what you’ll declare?”

“Arthur,” he says, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I very much do not have all my shit together. I don’t even have a tiny fraction of it. I’m severely lacking in shit.”

Arthur rolls his eyes, fondly. Howie is a deeply dramatic person. “What do you want to do after graduation?”

“I went to college because my mom said I had to,” Howie says. “So...” He shrugs, pulling a self-deprecating face. It’s all couched in jokes, but Arthur thinks there’s something genuinely self-critical and unhappy, buried deep. It’s something he often thinks, about Howie.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, either,” Arthur says.

“ _You_?” asks Howie, but something in the hard set of his shoulders eases. He looks relieved, Arthur thinks; like it helps to hear he’s not the only one fumbling.

“Me,” Arthur agrees lightly.

“Well then,” says Howie, “what say you to stumbling through it together?” He flirts so much more easily, these days. It’s still the wordiest flirting that Arthur has ever been a party to, but it’s open and it’s charming. He’s smiling. A wave of affection rolls through Arthur.

“A worthwhile proposal,” Arthur says, smiling back. “But I can’t declare your major for you.”

“What! Calumny and slander. I wasn’t going to ask you to!” Howie pauses, and then he adds, “I was just going to scroll through the list of possible majors with my eyes shut and then pick whatever I point at.”

He’s joking. 

Arthur hopes he’s joking, at least.

“You still have time. A great deal can happen in two months.”

“Look at you, all reasonable,” Howie says, warm, and they’re smiling at each other again when Arthur’s phone buzzes on the table. He’d left it out in case Kristy and Cora wanted to report in on the status of their hunt for the dining hall's mythical tater tots (which, at this point, Arthur is a touch concerned about the recipe for, given the lengths to which students are willing to go to get their hands on them). Considering how long they’ve been gone, they’re almost certainly going to return with tales of dining hall derring-do.

The text isn’t from Kristy or Cora. _Good news: just hired the new Mahoney RA. You're off the hook! Thanks again!_ Then there is an empty box, which indicates that Jonathan tried to send him an emoji.

Arthur sets his phone down. “It’s official: Spring semester starts tomorrow and I’m no longer an RA in Mahoney House.”

“Aw,” says Howie. “But I tasted the forbidden fruit, and I liked it.”

“I don’t think you’ve tasted a fruit in your life,” Arthur says. He leans forward over the table. Earnestly: “You’re going to get scurvy. I’m genuinely concerned.”

When Howie laughs, his face lights up. It’s hard to remember that Arthur ever thought him unremarkable. It seems utterly impossible now.

“So it’s official, huh?” Howie asks. “You don’t hold dominion over me anymore. In the university’s eyes.”

“In the university’s eyes,” Arthur confirms, his mouth twitching.

“And your job’s not at risk if anyone walks in on you blowing my mind.”

“That’s terribly flattering,” says Arthur, “and yes, though I’m not planning to have that particular problem again. Once was more than enough.”

“Locked doors and socks,” Howie agrees fervently.

Arthur magnanimously doesn’t point out that there was both a locked door and a sock between them and Mitch.

“So…” Howie says, picking up his fork. He falls prey to his ellipses, for a moment, but Arthur waits, because he's clearly picking his words with some care. “We don’t have to make with the sneaking, anymore.”

And this is it: the crux of the matter. The conversation that Arthur has been half-dreading for two weeks.

“That’s true,” says Arthur.

Howie looks thoughtful for a second, and then he shrugs and tucks into a pile of neon orange macaroni and cheese. “Cool.”

“Cool?” says Arthur. It feels anticlimactic. He tries not to sound dubious.

“Cool. I mean, Kristy and Cora know—”

“Kristy and Cora know too much,” Arthur says darkly. The pair of them have become unlikely fast friends, which has been both delightful and somewhat concerning. Arthur suspects he’s being plotted against, even now.

“—O-kay, cryptic paranoid weirdo, you’re fine,” Howie says. Arthur suspects that were there not a table between them, Howie would be condescendingly patting him. “ _Anyway:_ Amber and Mitch know, and I think … maybe I might tell my mom? So. That’s pretty much everyone, right there.”

He’s trying to play it off like it’s not a big deal (he’s busily crafting his mashed potatoes into alarming shapes instead of looking at Arthur), but Arthur knows the truth of it. He lays his hand over Howie’s forearm and gives it a brief press, and Howie smiles down at his tray. When Arthur goes to pull back, though, Howie reaches out and tangles his fingers in Arthur’s instead.

They're holding hands across the table in the dining hall. They've never done that before.

Arthur grips Howie's hand. Howie lifts his eyes to smile at him, and Arthur, warm all over, traces Howie's knuckles with two fingers.

“We got tots, motherfuckers!" Cora announces, and she drops a tray full of an enormous bounty of crispy fried potatoes into the center of the table. She thunks into the seat beside Howie. “The line was a slaughterhouse. And I said go save a table, not make me throw up.”

“I think it’s wonderful!” says Kristy loyally, sitting down next to Arthur and beaming at both of them. Howie has gone a little red in the face, but he’s still holding Arthur’s hand. “We just won’t mention when it all started, to Jonathan.”

“Please don’t,” Arthur agrees.

“Is that paperwork? Who does paperwork at brunch?” Cora says, disgusted, flicking a tater tot at Howie.

Before it can escalate into a full-on food fight, Arthur says, “He’s having an existential crisis over declaring a major.”

“Traitor,” says Howie mildly.

“Join theater,” Cora says. “It’s the business.”

“Sorry, Caldwell, already had my one-semester flirtation with Billy Shakes in the fall; I’m over it.”

It takes a moment to process, but Arthur is fairly certain Howie is referring to William Shakespeare.

Theater is one of a handful of topics on which Cora can be trusted to be both passionate and deeply genuine, no irony or sarcasm need apply. She launches into an impassioned defense of the virtues of modern playwriting, while Howie looks like he’s considering pelting her with tater tots.

Arthur reaches out and pulls the tray of tater tots a few inches farther away from Howie. Across the table, Howie is only distracted from narrowing his eyes at him when his cell phone buzzes. He picks it up, takes a look at the screen, and then sends a quick one-handed text.

“He’s not even listening,” says Cora. “Hey, asshole.” She pelts Howie with another tater tot. This one bounces off his shoulder.

“Children,” says Arthur.

“I just told Amber and Mitch where we’re sitting." Howie vaguely waves his phone in Cora’s direction. It’s a half-hearted, absent attempt at defending himself from further tot attacks; clearly, he's much more concerned with the pending new arrivals. He looks at something over Arthur's shoulder, then hisses, “Everybody _be cool_.”

“We’re always cool,” says Kristy, giggling, and then, "You must be Amber! Hi!"

"Hi." Howie's best friend swings around the table to sit down in the open chair beside Howie. She's moving more cautiously than Arthur had expected, given the bombastic nature of the Howie-and-Amber stories that Howie tells, but it must be a strange situation to come into.

"Hello," says Arthur, and Amber hesitantly smiles at him. She has a tray full of actual brunch foods, so this is clearly not the source of Howie's corn-dogs-for-breakfast gusto. "I don't believe we've been properly introduced."

Amber's expression warms, then, and she rolls her eyes. "Yeah, Howie's bad with stuff like that."

"Howie's _right here_ ," says Howie.

"I'm Amber."

"Arthur," says Arthur, and he tries to offer his hand, but Howie silently but vehemently refuses to release his vise grip on him, so Arthur reaches out across the table to shake Amber's hand with his left hand, instead. They shake. It's somewhat awkward. 

But Amber's eyes flick down to the table, where the brief struggle that resulted from Howie's refusal to let go of Arthur's hand nearly resulted in the salt shaker being knocked flying, and where they're still holding hands. A tiny smile appears at the corners of her mouth. 

Mitch has followed along behind Amber, and looks confused by all of the introductions. "Uh, I'm Mitch?" 

"You," says Arthur, "I remember."

Cora sighs sharply. “Please tell me one of you has correct opinions and can explain to Howie why his feelings on theater are a pile of hot steaming garbage.”

“Ooh, pick me,” says Amber.

“I take it back,” Howie says. “I’ve created something unholy. You’re not invited to brunch.”

“It’s too late for regrets now, Jenkins,” says Amber cheerfully, and she and Cora are off to the races.

Arthur squeezes Howie’s hand.

Howie squeezes back.


End file.
